Locked PDFs

Many PDFs you purchase from sites such as Teachers 4 Teachers are locked by the author. This is to prohibit anyone from editing the content and reselling it as their own.

On the Mac PDF viewing app "Preview" , you are allowed to annotate a locked PDF (adding text, images, etc, to the PDF). Just to be clear, this IS NOT re-editing or modifying the PDF in any way! It's simply adding another layer of text and images on top of the original PDF.

If you try to send a PDF to the copy center that has been annotated in Preview, the annotations WILL NOT be printed, even though they show up in the PDF preview when you submit them online and on the Preview app on your Mac. When the copy center staff submits your locked PDF to the server for printing, the server verifies whether the PDF is locked or not. If it is locked, any annotations or changes will be stripped. Instead only the original PDF will be printed.

This limitation is put in place by Adobe, because the creator of the PDF has asked that it not be modified, even for personal use. There is nothing we can do to change that.

To check to see if a PDF is locked, simply open it up in Preview. On the top menu, select "Edit". If "Delete" is greyed out, then the PDF is locked and cannot be edited. The Copy Center has no way of unlocking PDFs.

Please follow the steps above to verify whether the PDF is locked before submitting to the copy center.

Thank you,

MISD Copy Center