Retaining highlighting after flattening a PDF

After flattening a PDF, by using the ‘Adobe to PDF’ you may have noticed that highlighting colors can be altered in the resulting PDF.  

 For example, if you have a transcript like this:

. . . and you select ‘Adobe PDF’ to flatten the PDF by writing it to a new PDF file . . .

. . . first look under the Advanced options and see if you have a color profile selected which is something like ‘Working CMYK: US Web Coated (SWOP) v2’ as shown in this example.  It may be set as the default color profile in Acrobat.  It’s used for printouts on high quality paper.

 It will darken the colors like this and make the resulting, flattened PDF harder to read.

. . . to retain the highlighting colors in a flattened PDF, instead select the profile, ‘Working RBG: sRGB IEC61966-2.1’

As the caption in the advanced settings notes, this profile is geared towards the color settings for most monitors. The name is a reference to a document published by the International Electrotechnical Commission which sets a standard for the implementation of RGB (Red, Green, Blue) color models used by electronic displays.   CMYK stands for ‘Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key/Black’ and is a color model designed for hard copies.

bulk downloading PDFs from a website using Edge

The Tip of the Night for October 28, 2022 discussed how to use the Linkclump extension for Chrome to bulk download multiple PDFs from a website. Note that the extension designed for Chrome can be used in the Edge browser which includes a setting that will help expedite the process of downloading many PDFs quickly.

Access the Edge browser settings for PDFs by going to: edge://settings/content/pdfDocuments  

Toggle the option to always download PDF files when they are opened in Edge.

If you browse to the page for the Linkclump extension in the Chrome store using the Edge browser:

. . . you will see that it gives you the option to install it in Edge.

With Linkclump activated, when you hold down 'z; on the keyboard and press the left click button on your mouse, you can drag an orange box over the links to PDFs you want to download. With Edge set to download PDF files automatically, they will be saved to your selected download folder in one step.

powershell script to get list of file types

You can use this PowerShell script to generate a list of each file extension on a C drive.

Get-ChildItem -Path C:\ -Recurse -File | Select-Object Extension -Unique | Sort-Object Extension

As always I’ve tested this method and confirmed that it works. It should take 10 to 20 minutes depending on the size of the hard drive.