I get lots of review copies of books for my work. Most of the time they come as PDFs, but occasionally I get a link to a site like DocSend or Box that visually shows the PDF in a browser window, but doesn’t allow the end user to download it.
For obvious reasons, not ideal to read/markup a PDF in a browser window and seems like there should be a way around this with a browser extension or some other way to capture a long PDF since it’s fully visible.
FYI – totally get why people do this (to prevent unauthorized sharing). Not trying to do anything nefarious here…just want to have local PDF copy so I can take notes and highlight for my own use in DEVONthink.
Anybody figured out a way to get something like this into a PDF?
Just curious. If the app is protecting the PDF from being printed or saved, is it not protecting the file against you taking it for free? So, isn’t your attempt to do an end run around the copy or save restriction an example of doing something nefarious?
What happens when you contact the publisher and ask whether they offer a (free) hard copy or an access link with the (free) ability to download the file?
Is this also paywalled content? Doesn’t the copyright or perhaps the royalty limits in such cases also say that you are not permitted to own (download or save or print) a copy of the content unless you pay for it?
Well, no. I both have permission to access the book and would also happily pay for it (and often do when a review copy comes in a format like this) but in this case the book isn’t not available for sale yet (i.e. an early review copy from a publisher). Just trying to get it into a format I use take notes on and highlight vs. a web interface where I can’t.
It’s not technically paywalled – but in this case had enter my email address to access. That’s unusual though – often when I get these, I just get a private link (presumably they remove it later).
This isn’t very helpful, but in my experience, these sites typically display the PDF pages as jpegs, so any attempt to download them as PDF is DOA. They might display them in a frame that looks like it’s a PDF, but it’s actually jpegs to safeguard their content.
Actually helpful – and yes, I think that’s what’s happening, which is motivating me to make peace with the inevitable. Probably I’ll just get CleanShot X warmed up to do lots of text capture as I read.
Are you comfortable working with your browser’s web inspector? If so, it’s often possible to locate and extract either the file itself or the link to its source. Once you know where to look and what to look for, it’s not hard to do at all. There used to be a few YouTube tutorials on this, and I imagine they’re still out there.
There are a couple of Firefox extensions that will try to do this for you, and I assume there will be something similar for Chrome as well.
Hmmm, hadn’t thought about KM – I’ll fire it up and see if possible with scrolling. The complex part is that it’s not click for a next page but continuous scrolling.
Echo @carlsson . Capture pages as screenshots (cmd-shift 5) then combine files as a PDF with Mac’s built in Quick Action “Create PDF”. Possibly you could automate the screenshots with Keyboard Maestro.
Thanks to you and @carlsson – the combination of cmd-shift-5 and creating PDF worked. Took a bit since couldn’t automate the scrolling, but did the trick.
I use cmd-shift-3 and cmd-shift-4 all the time and didn’t even know there was a “5” option to do this. Nice.
