Creating PDF annotations through a MS Word merge

Question

We create personalized benefit statements by merging MS Excel data files with an MS Word template. We "print" the merge to PDF and send that PDF to the client for approval. Upon approval, we print the PDFs to a high-speed printer.

We have a client that wants key fields printed to the PDF as PDF annotations. I don't see how it can be done. In my mind, annotations are done one-at-a-time with Acrobat. I need to spin out 54,000 of these.

If we used a PHP or Python program to generate the PDFs, I see how we might do it, but I don't see how MS Word can do it.

I've suggest XMP as an alternative. Not sure how I would do it either but I have some options in my software toolbox to do that.

Answer 1

Have you looked at using PRINT field in Word to add pdfmark codes?

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdfmark_reference.pdf

You can include mergefields inside the pdfmark instructions.

Assuming you "Merge to Adobe PDF", in Word 2010 and Acrobat XI Pro, these example field codes in the screenshot below added a note or open comment box. Presumably similar technique would work for other annotation types?

Answer 2

Since I had a time constraint and vague specifications from the end receiver of the files, we merged all data for print production of the files to complete production.

We bought a utility to merge XML files into PDFs as annotations. To support this, we wrote a VBA script to extract the key fields from the data file and write an XML file for each PDF. We adjusted the XML tags for size, positioning and annotation type and ran the merge.

Thank you Tanya for your feedback and to those reviewing my question.