You may or may not realize that when you export a PDF file out of InDesign, it saves more than just what your file looks like. For example, if you have used InDesign’s File > File Info feature to add metadata (your name, file description, keywords, etc.), that information is passed on to the PDF. Viewers can then see that by choosing File > Document Info in Acrobat.
This turns out to be really useful in some situations (for example, it can save having to add that info manually in Acrobat each time you make a PDF). However, it can also be a cause of some embarassment if you wrote something in there that you didn’t expect or want readers to see.
I also just found another, somewhat more annoying bit of information that InDesign may save in your PDF file. If you enable Create Tagged PDF in the Export Adobe PDF dialog box, InDesign saves your paragraph style names, too! Whatever names you decided to use in InDesign appear in Acrobat’s Tags panel (View > Navigation Panels > Tags). Granted, it’s somewhat hidden, but if you’re working on a job that you really don’t like, and you decided to name your styles accordingly… well, I’m just sayin’…
Now, you might say, “well just don’t use Create Tagged PDF, but it turns out that that feature is actually very useful — in fact, necessary, if you’re going to be creating PDFs accessible to people with disabilities or for mobile devices. More on that topic to come in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, I just wanted people to be aware that what’s in your InDesign document can sometimes leak out into the real world.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on February 16, 2009
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