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AndMcT
Known Participant
November 11, 2022
Question

Bookmarks Not Working

  • November 11, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 837 views

Why do bookmarks not work on locked PDFs?

I can understand we are not allowed to edit a locked pdf.  But surely adding a bookmark is OK?  If you were reading a book at home, you wouldn't be prevented from using a bookmark or marking up.

I read a lot of documents on screen and rely heavily on being able to bookmark them.  If I cannot bookmark I am just going to end up printing them instead to mark them up.  Seems a bit wasteful, 22 years into the 21st century.

 

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2 replies

T
Test Screen Name
Legend
November 11, 2022

Those are the rules of PDF though, as set out by the PDF standard and now part of the internation standards body. Changing the rules would take a decade, I imagine, if you could get powerful players on your side.

try67
Community Expert
try67Community Expert
Community Expert
November 11, 2022

The comparison is not really a valid one. You can do a lot of things with physical books that you can't do with digital ones, and vice versa. Adding bookmarks (or comments) is editing the file. If it's secured (which I assume is what you mean by "locked") then editing it in some ways might be allowed (such as adding comments), but not in other ways (such as adding bookmarks). This might be frustrating, but it's what the PDF format dictates.

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