Adobe Digital Editions DRM

[owl123]

I can confirm that chorpler's method works... most of the time. I've already encountered an ADE PDF file that had no "Print First" line. Unfortunately I can't do any more testing on the file.

[chorpler]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I have (and use, pretty much daily) Acro Pro 7. I have 5 installed on a second machine, because I have a couple of plugins for it that I don't have in 7. (Can't afford them, and one--Compose--may no longer be available.)

I have a copy of 6, which I used briefly until I got 7. I could (shudder, twitch) install it somewhere. What I remember of 6 was that it took almost a minute to open.

Yep, I had Acrobat 3D 7.0 installed, and I uninstalled it for 6.0. I should have just installed 6.0 on a virtual machine (which I've now done anyway), because as a normal PDF viewer, 6.0 is horrible -- it really does take forever to load. Like, 3-5 times longer than 7.0 took to load, when you try to view a PDF in a web browser.

[chorpler]

Originally Posted by owl123

I can confirm that chorpler's method works... most of the time. I've already encountered an ADE PDF file that had no "Print First" line. Unfortunately I can't do any more testing on the file.

Yes, I had the same problem -- you have to download the ebx.etd file with Acrobat 6.0 and then not ever open the file in any other version of Acrobat or Digital Editions. If you open it in Digital Editions or download it with Digital Editions in the first place, the "Print First" line disappears and you can't do this method. And if you open it with anothe version of Acrobat or even with a plugin installed in Acrobat 6.0, the ability to change the security to "No Security" vanishes.

A virtual machine, like Sun's freeware VirtualBox, is a great way to go here, so you don't have to deal with Acrobat 6.0 on your normal system. Which is why it will still be grand when Cabbage's method is adapted for PDFs -- it will avoid all this crap.

[owl123]

Chorpler: Ah, that must be it. I downloaded the ebx.etd file with ADE like half a year ago and tried opening the downloaded PDF with Acrobat 6.0. Thanks.

You could also get VMware ThinApp which will enable you to have various versions of Adobe Acrobat installed and working. It's not freeware though.

[MidknytOwl]

Oh, I think I love you.

My Digital Editions died after it forced me to upgrade to 1.7, and as much fun as the volley back and forth Adobe support has been over the last week, they have yet to actually help at all...which with it not functioning meant no protected PDFs would work their way onto my reader, or even open on my computer unless I downgraded to Acrobat 7.

Yup. Definitely strong fuzzy feelings.

[joblack]

Originally Posted by chorpler

Yeah, the actual page has disappeared, but the archive is still there, and the pastebin files are there.

Of course, it doesn't help for PDF files ... but last night I discovered there's a decent way to export all the pages of a DRM-encrypted PDF file to a new no-security file, so the Copistar method, at least, is no longer necessary.

Unfortunately, you do lose "named destinations" in the new file, so you may have to redo those to make links work.

ETA: Oh, and the big inconvenience of it is, you must have Acrobat Professional 6.0 installed, but not 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, or Digital Editions. Then it's a simple hex-edit and a few steps, and you're golden.

I have tried it - the problem is that you use any kind of Metadata (TOC, ...) ...

[MidknytOwl]

Originally Posted by joblack

I have tried it - the problem is that you use any kind of Metadata (TOC, ...) ...

The three books I tried this on it deleted all the bookmarks, which I remade so I had a table of contents. However, after putting them on my reader the table of contents links work - as in if I'm on the table of contents page of the book (not from the reader's table of contents, but the actual book page), I can button down to a section and hit enter and it goes to it. So that part carries over at least, which was a pleasant surprise for me.

Or maybe it's not connected to the PDF and always works? I wouldn't know. And probably shouldn't be tryingto figure out how to explain what I'm thinking at 1:30 in the morning...hopefully you got the idea of what I was trying to say.

[chorpler]

Originally Posted by MidknytOwl

The three books I tried this on it deleted all the bookmarks, which I remade so I had a table of contents. However, after putting them on my reader the table of contents links work - as in if I'm on the table of contents page of the book (not from the reader's table of contents, but the actual book page), I can button down to a section and hit enter and it goes to it. So that part carries over at least, which was a pleasant surprise for me.

Or maybe it's not connected to the PDF and always works? I wouldn't know. And probably shouldn't be tryingto figure out how to explain what I'm thinking at 1:30 in the morning...hopefully you got the idea of what I was trying to say.

Yes, unfortunately all the metadata, including bookmarks and "named destinations," disappear with this method. If there are links inside the text, they will stop working if they're based on "named destinations", so you have to rebuild them. If they're based on going to a specific page, though, they continue to work.

You can actually copy the Bookmarks over to the new file by doing the "Document ... Pages ... Replace" trick detailed here, but the "named destinations" have to be redone by hand.

To do this, while you're in the original PDF, go to "View ... Navigation Tabs ... Destinations" and then click on "Options ... Scan Document." If nothing appears in the window (despite the "sorting..." at the bottom of the window), there are no named destinations in the document. If there is anything in the window, then click on "Options ... Sort by Page" to see the order they occur in the document. Then you need to write down or screen capture or somehow preserve the list of named destinations, because Adobe will use the same window to display the named destinations in the new document -- you can't leave it open and edit the new document's named destinations at the same time.

Then open the new document. The named destinations window will stay open, so go to "Options ... Scan Document" again. You have to do this to enable adding new named destinations. Once you do this, you can click on the "New Destination" button and add a new destination that points to the current page. So take a look at your list of named destinations in the old document, press ctrl-shift-N to go to each page, and add and rename each named destination when you're on the page it points to. When you're done, save the PDF file and it's all good.

Fun stuff! Clearly it will be much easier when Iheartcabbages's crack is adapted for PDFs, but this is at least better than the old screenshot/OCR method...

[daesdaemar]

Originally Posted by chorpler

Actually, there is one already. That's how I learned it -- I was talking about the epub DRM stripper on another ebook-related forum, and I said I hoped that it would be adapted for PDF too, and somebody said "PDFs have been strippable for months," and gave me a link to this text file describing the process.

What he said isn't entirely true, because it isn't a simple DRM removal; you have to have Acrobat Pro 6.0 installed, and what you do is disable the DRM and then export all the pages to a new, DRM-free PDF file. This is superior to the old Copistar/screenshot method because it gives you the original PDF structure, with text and images intact; however, you lose bookmarks and "named destinations" in the file, which means links in the file often break. But it's definitely a step up from the previous Copistar/screenshot method of converting DRM'd PDFs. Now all we need is Topaz and things will really be rollin'!

The original tutorial is here:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Adobe/Gal...zon-remedy.txt

The main thing to remember is that when it says Acrobat 6.0, it means it. If you even install a plugin, it will break this. Virtual machines sure are nice for this kind of thing.

OK, I've never used a hex editor in my life. I downloaded a free version of Hex Editor Neo. I opened an Adobe DRMed book and used the "find" command in the Edit menu to look for the word print and it says term not found. Am I doing it right or wrong?

[MidknytOwl]

I've never used one either...kind of scary looking, huh?

Anyway, it might be this:

Originally Posted by chorpler

you have to download the ebx.etd file with Acrobat 6.0 and then not ever open the file in any other version of Acrobat or Digital Editions. If you open it in Digital Editions or download it with Digital Editions in the first place, the "Print First" line disappears and you can't do this method. And if you open it with anothe version of Acrobat or even with a plugin installed in Acrobat 6.0, the ability to change the security to "No Security" vanishes.

[chorpler]

Originally Posted by daesdaemar

OK, I've never used a hex editor in my life. I downloaded a free version of Hex Editor Neo. I opened an Adobe DRMed book and used the "find" command in the Edit menu to look for the word print and it says term not found. Am I doing it right or wrong?

Sounds like you're doing it right, but you may need to re-download the book using Acrobat Pro 6.0. If you downloaded it with something else, the "Print" line may not be there.

Oh, as MidknytOwl pointed out. Yes, that could very well be the problem.

[daesdaemar]

Thank you both MidknytOwl and chorpler... It worked, and I did not lose my links within the document as some people have reported.

This is great!

[chorpler]

Originally Posted by daesdaemar

Thank you both MidknytOwl and chorpler... It worked, and I did not lose my links within the document as some people have reported.

This is great!

Excellent! That means that the creator of the PDF file made the links go to a specific page in the file, rather than making them go to a "named destination." Just don't expect that to always be the case.

[pfisterfarm]

I've used this method a couple of times and had it work, but on several files, I get a "this document can't be opened on this computer. Was this document acquired on another machine?" message. If I hit Yes, nothing happens. If I hit No, it asks me if I want to learn about Adobe DRM protected files (I haven't said Yes to that one yet, but if you say No, nothing further happens).

In all cases when I got that message, the file was acquired on that machine (a VirtualBox machine).

In all of the files I've tried, the Print First line is there, and I've changed the zero to a one.

When I don't get that message, it works great. Has anyone seen this message? Am I out of luck for now?

Thanks!

[chorpler]

Originally Posted by pfisterfarm

I've used this method a couple of times and had it work, but on several files, I get a "this document can't be opened on this computer. Was this document acquired on another machine?" message. If I hit Yes, nothing happens. If I hit No, it asks me if I want to learn about Adobe DRM protected files (I haven't said Yes to that one yet, but if you say No, nothing further happens).

In all cases when I got that message, the file was acquired on that machine (a VirtualBox machine).

In all of the files I've tried, the Print First line is there, and I've changed the zero to a one.

When I don't get that message, it works great. Has anyone seen this message? Am I out of luck for now?

Thanks!

As I recall, Adobe DRM used two different methods of activation, one that was tied to the computer and another that was tied to an account. The ones I've downloaded have all been tied to my account. When you tried to open the ebx.etd file in Acrobat 6.0 on your VirtualBox machine, did it take you to Adobe's website and make you log in with a Microsoft Passport?