> pdfs by no means are "flattened" which basically just means rasterized into pixels by default. that was my impression. if you can select & copy the text, then it is not "flattened" into the background.  also, the background issue.  > prior to generative ai tools, this has to be done by clone stamping and manually painting the background or taking an average of all surrounding pixels together and blurring them in a region.  that is meticulous work to do convincingly. we are only now seeing ai tools that come close to being able to do this, and at present the computer's "logic" would probably handle that task about as well as it renders hands and fingers.
Kekistani