Easily Gather and Incorporate Design Feedback with Adobe Acrobat and InDesign

Gathering feedback is a critical step in the design workflow, but the process isn’t always efficient. Adobe Acrobat makes it easy to share PDF versions of your designs for review. Stakeholders can use Acrobat to add detailed comments and annotations, and then you can quickly bring those markups back into Adobe InDesign to see them in the context of your layout.

Send a PDF for review

Export your InDesign file as a PDF and then open it in Acrobat to begin the review process. You can start a shared review by clicking the blue Share button at the top-right of the Acrobat window or by selecting the Send for Review button in the Tools panel.

Figure 1: Begin the review process in Acrobat by clicking the Share button or using the Send for Review tool.

In the Share panel, enter your reviewers’ email addresses and then choose the Review file option in the following section. This will initiate your shared review.

Let reviewers add feedback right on your PDF

Your stakeholders can use Notes, Drawing, and Text tools in Acrobat to add detailed markups and comments that are shared directly to the PDF via Adobe Document Cloud. Comments are displayed in a panel right beside the PDF.

Figure 2: Annotations added directly to the PDF are also reflected in the Acrobat Comments panel.

Bring comments back into InDesign

Open the original design file in InDesign. Choose Import PDF Comments from the File menu, and select the PDF file containing the comments from your shared review.

Figure 3: Annotations added to the PDF in Acrobat appear in the PDF Comments panel in InDesign.

The PDF Comments panel provides a list of all comments as well as a visual representation of annotations created with the Text, Notes, and Drawing tools in Acrobat. The panel also lets you mark comments “Complete” so you can keep track of changes and work more efficiently.

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