I can’t open it so I have to use PF Mergy or Lumin or something.
It says it cannot scan the doc for virus, “do I want to download it anyway.” I don’t know the sender personally, just over a forum.
How do I scan the document for viruses? Will it be my doc when I open it? Or is it proprietary to Google Drive? I would hate that.
Your antivirus will scan every file when its first opened.
Its just complaining the download isn’t a type that its scan-on-download can handle.
You don’t have to use PDF merge or Lumin … its probably a pdf…
As long as the file is not an executable, like a .exe .com .bat. .scr … then its going to be allright, double clicking a pdf just makes it run the filename as an argument to the .exe … “acrobat.exe thisfile.pdf”… well like that… and acrobat then opens the file …
If you open a document on Google Drive, then it remains on Google Drive. Whoever created it can certainly edit or view it, and they can also allow other people to edit or view it. They presumably gave you permission to view it, or there wouldn’t be any point sending you the link, and they may or may not have also given you permission to edit it. They could also have given these permissions to any number of other people.
Given any Google document that you can view, you can also download a copy of it, in a variety of formats. For a word processor document, you can choose to download it in Microsoft Word format, or PDF, or a few others. For other sorts of documents, precisely which formats you can download it as will vary, but there will always be that option. Once you download it, the copy that you have on your machine is yours, and you can do whatever you want with it. Nothing you do to your copy will affect the copy on Google, and nothing anyone does to the copy on Google will affect your already-downloaded copy.
OK I downloaded it and could see the doc.
I used the printer icon to bring up the screen for print. It took a long long time to load in the preview screen. When I print I get an unhappy puzzle piece emoji and the pages all come out blank.
Anyone got a tip here? Am I not allowed to print?
Interesting. I got it to print page 1. it’s a half a million kilobytes. What part of the chain doesn’t like printing that size doc and gives me the frowny?
Chances may be better than 99.99% the OP’s file is harmless, but the quoted statement may not be fully correct.
There are “exploits” (e.g. overruning a buffer into a stack frame) that can cause a virus like “thisfile.pdf” to coerce “acrobat.exe” to execute malicious code.
Steps are often taken to circument such exploits if and when they’re discovered, but not all virus detectors are up-to-date.
Yes, but I read the OP as saying he can’t get it to open on Google Drive, so he’s downloading it.
The subsequent printing problems make me wonder if there’s something strange about the file, or a problem with the OP’s computer. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen symptoms like this, so I can’t help. I could probably figure it out if I had the file and access to the OP’s computer, but not diagnosing over the Internet.
What is the document supposed to be? Did the sender give you any particular instructions for what to do with it?
Keeping your PDF viewer up-to-date can also help prevent exploits.