This week I needed to print some internet documents for my wife. (All for a nursing class; all legal) When I hit the print button, I got a flag that said it was "Flattening" and there was the inevitable twirling hourglass. I let it set and do that for about 30 minuts, and then it printed one (of five) pages. Eventually this exact process was repeated, at great length, for all five pages. My question is: What is 'flattening' and is this something I need to worry about?

Flattening is a procedure Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader sometimes use in order to remove transparency from a document prior to saving or printing. Unfortunately, in documents with a very large number of transparent objects, Reader can sometimes bog down as it fills the print buffer with an enormous document--especially if you're printing over a network.

I don't know what pdf files you happened to be printing, but the fix would be for whoever wrote the pdf files in the first place to go in and fix things. There's not much you can do on your end other than print something else instead... unless you're seeing this with EVERY pdf you print, in which case there's probably a conflict going on.

It's a course description for an avanced nursing program. It has never happened before and I am quite relieved to know it's their, and not my, problem. Thank you for the information.

Hi Haze.
Nothing you did wrong; the files wheren't prepared properly before they where posted.