3 ways to flatten a PDF and make it look good in PandaDoc

Sometimes, PDFs uploaded to PandaDoc look completely broken. One part of the original document may be misplaced, another part may even be absent. Distorted fonts, wrong colors, and all other kinds of visual artifacts are usually the consequences of the fact that the PDF consists of several layers.

In PandaDoc, PDFs are processed by a third-party tool that is not designed to work with multiple-layer documents. Even if uploaded PDFs look normal after you upload them into PandaDoc, it’s better to play it safe and flatten your PDF so that it becomes uneditable and, therefore, unbreakable.

Here are 3 simple ways to do that:

Use your browser

You can easily collect several PDF layers into one right inside your browser. Almost any browser will work - you just need to be able to open your PDF and print it.

Open the PDF in the browser window.
Click the Print button and choose ‘Microsoft Print to PDF’ (for Windows) or ‘Save as PDF’ (for macOS) as a destination.
Click Print or Save, enter your new flattened file’s name, and wait until it’s processed.

Use a third-party PDF reader

You can do the same with any other software that allows you to view PDF documents. Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader are the best examples of such programs but you can choose any other you personally prefer.

Open the document in your PDF reader.
Click File > Print or just the Print button.
Choose ‘Microsoft Print to PDF’ (for Windows) or ‘Save as PDF’ (for macOS) as a printer.
Click Print and wait for the file to be processed.

Use a free online PDF flattener

In case you are okay with a third-party website temporarily storing your files, you can use a free PDF flattening tool available right inside your browser. There are tons of them but you may want to choose one of the most popular:

The most peculiar advantage of such tools is that they have some additional options. For example, you can choose to flatten everything inside your document or form fields only.

Options are endless

Basically, you can use any tool you have at your fingertips to flatten a PDF - it just needs to have an option to open your file and to print it (and the ‘Print to PDF’ must be among the ways to print). But if you don’t have time to look for an appropriate way to make your document look great in PandaDoc, use one of those listed above.

Note: in many cases before flattening, you’ll be able to change your original document’s settings such as page size, orientation, etc. You are free to play with these settings but if you don’t want to make any changes in your document, leave them as is.

Your turn

Do you have to flatten PDFs often and know some better ways to do that? Feel free to share them with the others.