Printing protected PDFs
Quite some time ago, Anna was trying to print some protected PDFs and asked me to help.
On Windows I have no idea how this could be done, but on Linux I did the following…
Most of the documents where easy to print by converting them to PostScript with pdf2ps, but this didn’t work in all situations (some files broke the transformation). So I fiddled around with Ghostscript and came up with the following solution:
gs -sOutputFile=[outputfile.ps] -sDEVICE=pswrite [pdf-file]
The end result is that you get the input file pdf-file transformed into PostScript in outputfile.ps, ready to print. The only problem with this approach is that you have to press enter for each page, but that is a small price to pay.
Now I can delete a message from my inbox in which I reminded myself how I did this ;)
To get rid of the press enter, just add ‘-dBATCH -dNOPAUSE’ to the commandline
Thanks… I knew there was a reason I didn’t close commenting for older entries ;)
You can also try Copistar that enables you to print proteced PDFs as well. Kind of auto-catpure which works well.
Forget about complicated stuff, you only need to have a gmail account, simply upload the pdf to Google Docs, and then, there is a “print” link on your doc.
That easy!