Password Security on PDFs

[Anoze]

Hey everybody. I really like the player's guide for Skull & Shackles; the battle scars/amputations created a very interesting tool for the DM I thought. Yes there wasn't a lot pertaining to races and classes but I thought using the rest of the guide to develop the naval combat rules was appropriate. Especially if Paizo already had something else planned for the later pages of the first adventure and couldn't put the new rules there.
Anyway, on to my question/concern. When I downloaded the player's guide I attempted to extract a few choice pages from the PDF, but couldn't because of a password. Is this a new policy being enacted on all PDFs, just this one or perhaps even just on mine? Does the PDF come with the password (though I think that would defeat the point) and I'm missing something? Or is this something Paizo is doing to try and limit their customers actions with their PDFs?
Thank you Paizo for what seems will be another good Adventure Path and thank you in advance to any/all of you who have an input with respect to this issue. Have a great day.

[Liz Courts]

Adobe doesn't allow the granular security that we'd like on our PDFs—there's a more thorough discussion of the topic here. In particular, this post by Vic Wertz as well as further information in the thread.

[Anoze]

Liz Courts wrote:

Adobe doesn't allow the granular security that we'd like on our PDFs—there's a more thorough discussion of the topic here. In particular, this post by Vic Wertz as well as further information in the thread.

I can understand that the option to pick and choose which security options they want to implement isn't under Paizo's control. My concern is more founded by the fact that nothing else I've ever download from Paizo (free or not) has ever had a password on it. I've gotten into the habit of extracting a few pages from several different PDFs and making a small custom read for my players when preparing for a new Adventure Path. It isn't that I can't simply give them all the files required, but thought it easier for them if they didn't have to sift through different files. Furthermore, though I can see the positive impact of having a password on their PDFs (especially with respect to anti-piracy), I'm worried that it might alienate the vast majority of their customers. My two cents, anyway it isn't directly germane to me being able to extract my pages.

If this is something that most customers have been dealing with for some time then there is little sense in delving further into it. Again I suppose its more frustrating for me because it is my first experience with a password on a PDF ("We be Goblins" was another free download and it didn't have a password). Anyway, thank you very much for your timely response, I appreciate it greatly. Have a great weekend.

[Vic Wertz]

Every watermarked PDF (free or not) has had the same security settings ever since we began selling PDFs. If something has changed, it may be in the capabilities of your PDF reader.

[Coridan]

You can always snapshot the pages and put them together yourself. Lot of effort though when they can download it free from Paizo themselves.

[Steve Geddes]

Anoze wrote:

If this is something that most customers have been dealing with for some time then there is little sense in delving further into it. Again I suppose its more frustrating for me because it is my first experience with a password on a PDF ("We be Goblins" was another free download and it didn't have a password). Anyway, thank you very much for your timely response, I appreciate it greatly. Have a great weekend.

I get a couple of copies of each of the player's guide printed and bound professionally. It's apparently not the security, but something changes from one to the next (occasionally, anyhow) since the same professional printer can sometimes whiz through them in no time at all and other times has to manually extract each page (in fact each layer of each page, I think). Maybe it depends on the artwork-words ratio (or some other technical thing).

[feytharn]

I experienced this problem (password) with the map from the Inner Sea World Guide when it was out, when I tried to 'remove' the text layer, I don't know how I managed to get around it unfortunatly, but the current Acrobat reader didn't have this problem.
*edit: Just to clarify I didn't try to do anything unapproved with my pdf, I was referring to this

[Nezthalak]

I know that there can be issues in security settings with how things are read in Nitro PDF and Adobe. Other readers like Free PDF or open source programs I'm not as familiar with. The big 2 have the capability to toggle it off. If for some reason you can't, I would open it and save it again as something else. Easy fix sometimes.

[Chris Lambertz]

One thing that could be causing this could be a form of corruption from InDesign (similar to the printing issue that people have with the Player's Guides, which are being fixed now). But this kind of corruption is extremely difficult to pinpoint if it can't be replicated in our office. However, we do export all of our PDFs in the same exact way each time, so you really *shouldn't* be seeing any variation between the settings on one PDF to the next. If there are specific files that are causing issues, I can take a look. But, there certainly isn't an inconsistency upon export.

EDIT: I realize your issue has been with the Skull & Shackles Player's Guide. This PDF is being updated, so this may resolve the problem you are having. An email will be sent once this occurs.