Making personal notes on a protected document

[andrewk45064280]

I just purchased a PDF from ANSI, and my purchase confers limited permissions. I would like to make notes for personal use, but the protected permissions appears to prevent me from even highlighting sections of the document. I tried to "Save As" the document, but that did not unlock the ability to highlight or insert comments. Do I really have to print this out before I can annotate my own copy of the doc?

[mariahweyne]

Why Some PDF Files Cannot be Highlighted – Main Reason. One of the most important reason due to which users can't highlight text in PDF document is the “Comment Restrictions”. When this type of security is applied on the PDF files, the Adobe Reader “Highlight Tool” stops working or gets greyed out.

[andrewk45064280]

This is a correct diagnosis of the problem, but I'm looking for a solution. Seems to me there should be a difference between making a public comment on a document and highlighting a paragraph for personal reference. If I were the creator of the content, I would be most interested that others could make notes for themselves since doing so would indicate that others are taking the work I did seriously.  

[mariahweyne]

Suggestion - Print to ADOBE PDF and creating a new document.  Try hightlighting the new document.

[try67]

That might be the case for you, but the author of this specific file decided not to allow it, by applying a security policy that explicitly forbids the reader from adding comments to it, and Adobe will not allow you to "overcome" that restriction (unless you know the password used for the security policy). Other applications might, but this is not the place to discuss them.