BAA Journal DVDs

[John Thorpe]

Hi everybody

First: my apologies to Richard McKim for inadvertently adding this to his Mars thread! Sorry Richard.

Here goes again:

I have been trying to access Journal Articles from the BAA Journal DVDs (2nd Edition) and have copied the set to hard disk. I can access fine in Acrobat DC but when I try to extract or print pages I get a message to enter a password. Does anyone know the password or how to disable it?

One solution is to open the file on a Mac and open in Preview, but it would be much quicker and neater to use Acrobat.

Any help greatly appreciated

John

[Andy Wilson]

Hi John,

All of the Journals are also available in pdf format on the BAA website. You could try printing these instead.

You need to be logged in, and then you can access them at one of the following locations.

The older Journals are accessible via Publications -> Downloads -> Journal Archive.

https://britastro.org/downloads/3844

The newer Journals can be accessed via Publications -> Journals.

https://britastro.org/journal

I was able to print pages from the August 2007 Journal without a password. This was using Acrobate DC on Windows 10.

Best wishes,

Andy

[Andy Wilson]

Hi John,

Brief update as I’m having internet problems.

I now understand different the Journals may have been created with different security permissions. So the one you are attempting to print must have the printing option prevented.

Am I correct in thinking you have already found a work around, but this is a pain? Are you wishing to print lots of Journals/Articles or have you printed what you need.

Best wishes,

Andy

[John Thorpe]

Hi Andy

Thanks for pointing out the online Journal archive. Yes, I can print pages from that though I still get the encrypted message if I download and use Acrobat DC (Win 10).

I also noticed that a number of Journals appear to be missing eg Vol 110 numbers 1 – 3.

No real problem as Preview on the Mac seems to work fine.

Thanks again

John

[Dr Paul Leyland]

“Yes, I can print pages from that though I still get the encrypted message if I download and use Acrobat DC (Win 10).” Aah, that suggests that your browser will print anything it is displaying but that Acrobat is honouring the content creator’s wishes. I will try to look into it.

Good to see you have an effective if possibly crude work-around.

Added in edit:

A very quick search on “printing password protected pdf” turned up numerous sites, such as these two. https://passper.imyfone.com/pdf/how-to-print-password-protected-pdf/ & https://www.maketecheasier.com/recover-lost-pdf-passwords-linux/

I can’t vouch for either of them.

[Dominic Ford]

John,

PDF password protection is indeed (usually) rather easy to get around. Simply by opening the PDF in any third-party viewer other than the official Adobe Reader, you can usually circumvent all the restrictions, including printing (plus editing, page extraction, etc).

Taking a quick look at a handful of files, I believe the BAA has used various different security settings when preparing Journal PDFs at different times. All the ones I’ve looked at do allow printing, but block other actions. I could well believe that some might have restricted printing – presumably unintentionally.

It would be interesting to know exactly which PDF files are giving you trouble, though in the short term it will probably be much easier for you to circumvent than it will be for us to fix.

Cheers,

Dominic

[Andy Wilson]

Hi John,

Thanks for pointing out those missing Journals. I’ve added Volume 110, Numbers 1 – 3. There are changes in the pipeline so it isn’t worth doing a check of all Journals at this time. Though if any are missing that anyone needs access to sooner rather than later, let me know and I’ll get them added.

Best wishes,

Andy

[John Thorpe]

Thanks everybody for all the useful advice. And to Andy for adding the missing files in Vol 110. It was the journals around this date I was trying to read.

I guess my original enquiry was whether there was a common password for all the files. It looks like there is not, but this is no problem for me.

Cheers

John

PS: Andy, I typed some of my text in Word and I am not sure how to delete the formatting data which appears below 🙂

[Andy Wilson]

Hi John,

Glad to help.

I’ve cleared the formatting data from your post. There hidden text formatting present in word processors such as Word. I copied and pasted it into a pure text editor to remove the formatting. On Windows I use Notepad, and I forget the name of the standard one on Macs as I use Sublime Text.

Cheers,

Andy

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