Some Line and Arrow annotations show a small yellow sticky note icon in Acrobat

Technical Support Apryse SDK
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Question:

I have some PDF files from customer that when viewed in Adobe Acrobat show a small yellow sticky note icon beside certain Line/Arrow annotations. But same PDF viewed in other PDF readers does not show this yellow sticky note icon.

How do I avoid this?

Answer:

For some reason Acrobat will show a small yellow sticky note icon for some Markup annotation types, such as Line, if the following two conditions are met.

  1. Annotation contains non-empty Contents entry
  2. Annotation contains an explicit Appearance Stream AP entry.

Perhaps the best solution (if avoiding the situation itself is not possible) once an annotation is like this is to move the Contents to an IRT (In Reply To) annotation, so the Contents are still associated with the annotation, and still appear in a PDF readers annotations side panel, but the yellow sticky note will not appear.

Attached is C# code that will move the Contents to a child IRT annotation.

AnnotationTest.cs.txt (3.3 KB)