Password protected PDFs
Recently, I bought an eBook from Apress, and it came in PDF form. This was great. Unfortunately, it came with a password required to open it. This was not so great. Pragmatic Programmers also sells PDF-based eBooks, but they simply customized the book to have your name in the footer. This discourages “sharing” of the book, but doesn’t impede the rightful owner’s use of the material.
One of the big issues with the password is that it impedes DEVONthink from properly indexing the file, and that means it’s much harder to do annotations and cross-referencing. Turns out there’s an easy way to deal with it. Just print the file, but instead of pressing the print button on Mac OS X, go to the PDF tools menu, and select “Save as PDF”, and magically you’ll have a version without the restrictions.
I understand why they did this, but I think the technique chosen by Pragmatic Programmers is much better.
This entry was posted at 5:31 pm on 7 December 2007 and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
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