Have you ever opened a file and tried to do some annotations and takeoff and it was locked with no permissions for the viewer? Are you unable to even print it to a .pdf or affect any change to it?
Boooooo! Me Too. Looking for a workaround?
I Found One! Aaaannnd, You're welcome. — If you have a other workaround, please share in the comments.—
It’s so simple I can’t believe I didn’t try it earlier. Stripping the file of its security, changing permissions or trying to get a password was seemingly pointless, so I figured….. how about I open it in different ways and see if any other systems have print options that bypass the locked nature of the document, and Chrome was the answer.
After I saved the documents in a file locally, I Right clicked on the document in “File Explorer” and selected “Open With” and chose Chrome. Which opens it with a crazy file path, relative to where it's saved…. Then I clicked Print” and printed it with the Destination of “Save as PDF” Note: Do not use Bluebeam PDF the problem will persist.
After opening the newly printed file again in REVU® it is unlocked and all security properties listed are allowed. BAM!
Essentially there are no Security measures whatsoever after following this workflow. KA-POW!
I’m sure this would be the case in all other forms of PDF document control weather its REVU® or any other .pdf viewer.
Please share this with everyone you can because as I understand it, this is a VERY common issue, and I have faced it myself many times before, only to end up printing it to 11X17 paper, scanning and rescaling it, running OCR Mod, re-doing all the bookmarks and hyperlinks - Bla Bla Bla…. It may not work in every case, but it does for this one.
I love solving problems with outside the box thinking and it really saved my butt this time because I need to get all that bridge steel taken off by the end of the week. Yikes!
Special thanks to Ashley Cox and Ryan Arbuckle who are the Trainers I met at the Studio Essentials Course today. without them helping me look at this in several different perspectives, and going through the steps that we did, I probably wouldn’t have dreamt up this workaround.
Cheers!
