It’s late. You’re trying to finish a writing project, and you recall that a previous conference paper you wrote contains some passages that would be very helpful. You search your hard drive, looking for the paper.
Uh oh. It isn’t there. You begin to feel some despair about having to reconstruct your brilliant ideas from memory. Then you remember that you submitted the paper electronically to your professional association. Hurrah! You rush off to the relevant website and download the paper, looking forward to copying, pasting, and reworking the sections you need.
You fire up your PDF reader and select the text, head to the Edit menu, and … discover that the Copy option is grayed out. Someone has protected the file, and neglected to give you the password. Grr.
Now what?
If you’re a GMail user, you might be in luck. Give the following a try:*
- Once you’ve downloaded the file, email it to yourself as an attachment.
- When you open the email, tell GMail you want to view the attachment as HTML.
- Copy what you need, and paste it into your favorite wordprocessor or text editor.
You’ll probably have some cleanup work to do, but it’s considerably better than having to start from scratch.
Of course, you want to avoid this situation in the first place by not losing track of your original file; see this and this on the importance of having a good filing system. But if for whatever reason you’ve managed to misplace the original, this might work for you (I’m told it won’t always work; some types of protected PDFs can’t be viewed as HTML in Google).
*Try this only if you’re the owner of the work in question or you have permission from the owner. Team ProfHacker doesn’t support engaging in the same kinds of behavior we want our students to avoid.
The image in this post was created by Flickr user ePublicist and carries a Creative Commons license.
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