Hi all.
Recently I downloaded Stephen King’s on-line story from Amazon.com. It was free and I do not remember seeing any restrictions with regard to printing or distributing it to others. But the file menu does not give the option of printing the file. Is there any way to print it out so I can have a hard copy that others might read? Tahnks for your help,
John
PDF files can be printed with a utility called Adobe Acrobat. There is a read-only version (you can’t create new PDF files with it) available for free from Adobe. I’m surprised you can read it without being able to print it, since I thought you had to have Acrobat Reader even to read it.
“Riding the Bullet” is not public domain, it was Amazon’s decision to give away free copies for promotion. I’m pretty sure there is some sort of copy protection on those files - I’m surprised you didn’t see any copyright notice though.
I’m pretty sure that the problem you’re having with printing this .pdf file is that it is not a .pdf file.
“Riding the Bullet” is available as an .edt file, which can be with Adobe Glassbook. My guess is that .edt files and the Glassbook are intended as a format for electronic books and the difficulty that you are having printing them is probably intentional. You could save screen shots of each page as .bmp files, crop them, use an OCR program, and print out the resulting word document. This would be an enormous pain in the ass, but it would get the job done.
Pluto- I did have to download their version of Acrobat Reader to view the file, but perhaps their version is read only. Maybe I can import it into our other version of Adobe Acrobat and see if that works.
scr4- I did not see anything about reproducing or printing when I downloaded it. But I might not have been looking too hard for it either. I will go to Amazon and see if there are any legal notices before I proceed.
Thanks,
John
The Acrobat program that you create PDF files with allows you to set some security. The creator of the file can password protect the ablilty to make changes or the ability to print. You would need that password and the full Acrobat application to make this print.
If you’re willing to accept a really bad and tedious workaround, you can hit the ‘print scrn’ key on your keyboard and then paste the result into any app you may have that can print graphics. The quality will suck, and may not even be readable.
I used to do technical support for Acrobat, once upon a time.
Oops. Forgot a detail. You can check if the file is secured by going to the file menu in Acrobat Reader, choosing Document Info>Security. It should tell you if printing was intentionally disallowed.
Try running it thru the visually impaired Adobe Access thingy adobe.com/access I think it is. It turns PDF docs into HTML & a few other programs do it too. From there you could print I suppose.