Hi there,
I have a bunch of articles from McKinsey and HBR in PDF, but those PDFs are protected so I am not able to annotate them in DT4.
I tried turning on the “ForceEditablePDFs” hidden feature but it did not help. Interestingly, it is possible to annotate when opening a PDF in PDF Expert.
Is there any way to annotate those protected PDFs directly in DT? I’ve searched through the forum and understand this might be an issue with Apple PDFKit and hence there is no solution. If someone solved this issue, please share your solution.
Welcome @rokhro
DEVONthink indeed uses PDFKit and it also honors the permissions set by the PDFs owner. If they have prohibited modifying, copying from, printing, etc. their PDF, it is not our place to circumvent that.
PDF Expert doesn’t use PDFKit and Readdle has their own stances on the issue.
Ok, clear. I would have to move my annotation and highlighting workflow to PDF Expert then.
As otherwise it would not make sense to remember that certain documents are annotated in DT directly and some outside.
If the protected PDF’s allow it, you can “print” a new not-protected PDF, and then annotate that new file with DEVONthink’s tools, if that your preference. Try it. Might work. What one can do with protected files all depends on what the file creator decides and configures.
I tried it and it worked!