So, about that re-distillation prevention on PDFs…

Posted in Bad Ideas, Security - May 19, 2013 - 0 Comment

I got a PDF of my transcript from a university I used to attend. I won’t say which, but it’s in Salisbury and not very imaginatively named. The transcript had a variety of password-protection baloney on it, which I didn’t want.

Stripping the password is easy if you know it, because you can open the PDF in acrobat reader, select “print”, “print to file” and print to a postscript file (with a .ps extension). That removes the password protection, giving you a clear postscript file, which, in theory, you can distill back to PDF.

Unfortunately, the postscript file is marked as unredistillable (if that’s even a word). There is a fix for this, though: the exact opposite of what is described here.

Find the lines that say:

%ADOBeginClientInjection: DocumentSetup Start "No Re-Distill"
%% Removing the following eleven lines is illegal, subject to the Digital Copyright Act of 1998.
mark currentfile eexec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%ADOEndClientInjection: DocumentSetup Start "No Re-Distill"

and cut them out of the file. Yes, the file says this is illegal, and it might even be true, but that’s how it’s done.