Opening encrypted PDF files

[johnbirt]

I would specifically like to edit past mathematics examination papers in PDF format as provided by exam boards e.g. AQA etc.

Affinity Publisher refuses to even open anything provided  by AQA citing "non supported encryption method" as the reason. This seems a very severe restriction as almost any other editor I have will open and allow editing with no issue. For example PDF Expert for one and of course Adobe and others.

Surely shouldn't be a major problem for Affinity to follow suit? It would certainly help greatly with editing exam solutions and particularly for the IPad Publlsher. 

Any hope of a solution for this restriction? Currently opening in an editor that does allow it and then saving in unencrypted form to enable use in Publisher is a real pain when you have multiple papers to deal with.

I don't know why the papers have any encryption at all as they are freely available for download and printing and dissemination in schools and for individuals so seems rather pointless. 

 

 

[stokerg]

Hi @johnbirt,

I've just downloaded a PDF from AQA and when i try to edit it in Adobe Acrobat, i'm asked for a password.  I can also see its using AES encryption which is the method we don't support.  We do have an improvement logged with the Developers to support this, so hopefully we will see it added in a future build.

[David in Яuislip]

I just downloaded a couple of files which opened fine in Chrome so I used Ghostscript on them and now they open in Publisher

command is gswin64 -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=mine.pdf AQA-73671-QP-NOV21.PDF
or put this
for %%i in (*.pdf) do (
  gswin64 -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=.\out\%%i %%i
)

in a Windows bat file to process a directory and output to a sub-directory named out which you'll have to make yourself
This is for five files
start 12:27:34.77
end 12:27:38.38
so not too shabby

[johnbirt]

Thanks for responses. I have several “fixes” but await this being sorted in Publisher. Nice to see it is on the list for future improvement.

Currently using PDF Expert which does the job for now. Real advantage for me of Publisher would be easy integration with Photo and Designer.

Thanks again.

John B