I have a secret — I write children’s books.

<whew>… I’m so glad that’s out in the open. 🙂

Seriously, that means I use Track Changes, a lot. What I’ve found is that Track Changes isn’t dependable when you import text into a foreign format. Specifically, if you use Word’s Track Changes and then import finalized text into Adobe Acrobat, you might be in for a surprise.

I have at least one publisher who won’t use Word’s Track Changes feature because editing marks and comments show up in .pdf documents. I’ve seen this for myself, and it’s quite a mess. Editors claim they’re rejecting and accepting changes, but the editing marks still appear in Acrobat, overflowing in the margins usually.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a full-featured version of Acrobat, so I can’t test this for myself, but I wanted to put the warning out just the same. If I learn more, I’ll post a follow-up. In the meantime, if any of you have experienced this, please share your story.