Aura Reader not opening PDF

ChrisK91 · 04-19-2015, 05:52 AM

Hey fellow Kobo users,

I had my Kobo Aura for quite a while, an decided to add some text books to it. They are usually PDFs files, and differ in size. Page wise, they are readable and I mainly want to use them to revise single chapters on my commute. But I have a problem with a certain PDF file, which is around 250MB in size. The reader refuses to open it, stating that it's protected by Adobe Digital Rights Management. I found this odd, since all other PDFs worked fine so far. But I decided to go ahead and install ADE. The weird thing now is that ADE displays "viewing: on any decive" and "licensed to: unknown". I can open this PDF perfectly fine on my PC. Are there known issues with large PDFs and Kobo readers? And are there workarounds? I'd like to keep it in PDF, since the text is set in two columns...

Best regards
Chris

GeoffR · 04-19-2015, 06:13 AM

I can't guess what is wrong with the PDF, but don't take the "protected by DRM" message too seriously. When a Kobo device tries to open a book and fails, but doesn't know why it failed, then it assumes the failure was because the book is encrypted with DRM. It could just mean the book is corrupted, or there is just something about the book it can't handle.

ChrisK91 · 04-19-2015, 06:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GeoffR

I can't guess what is wrong with the PDF, but don't take the "protected by DRM" message too seriously. When a Kobo device tries to open a book and fails, but doesn't know why it failed, then it assumes the failure was because the book is encrypted with DRM. It could just mean the book is corrupted, or there is just something about the book it can't handle.

Oh, ok then. Is there a way I can check or repair the PDF? Adobe Reader is opening it without any issues...

Ok, so I was able to resolve the issue by running Ghostscript with these options

Code:

 gswin64c -o repaired.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress original.pdf

Now it opens the PDF.

GeoffR · 04-19-2015, 06:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChrisK91

Oh, ok then. Is there a way I can check or repair the PDF? Adobe Reader is opening it without any issues...

You could try copying it to the device again with a different filename, in case something went wrong during the original transfer. I don't know much about PDFs so this is just guessing: I don't think the size should be a problem, but you could try splitting it into two parts. (I've used pdfseparate from the poppler-utils package on Linux.)

arspr · 04-19-2015, 04:22 PM

I bet that your problem is that your pdf is the NEWEST flavour of them (256-bit AES protected, even if only for certain functions). These pdfs cannot be opened by Kobo, (and neither by Calibre BTW). In older FW versions they even crashed the device. Since 3.12, they just give a wrong error message about DRM protection.

You can find the whole story in this thread (which started about a performance drop with other pdfs). If you want to summarize, just jump to this post and continue reading from it.

04-19-2015, 05:52 AM	#1
ChrisK91 Junior Member Posts: 4 Karma: 10 Join Date: Dec 2013 Device: Kobo Aura, Kobo Glo	Reader not opening PDF Hey fellow Kobo users, I had my Kobo Aura for quite a while, an decided to add some text books to it. They are usually PDFs files, and differ in size. Page wise, they are readable and I mainly want to use them to revise single chapters on my commute. But I have a problem with a certain PDF file, which is around 250MB in size. The reader refuses to open it, stating that it's protected by Adobe Digital Rights Management. I found this odd, since all other PDFs worked fine so far. But I decided to go ahead and install ADE. The weird thing now is that ADE displays "viewing: on any decive" and "licensed to: unknown". I can open this PDF perfectly fine on my PC. Are there known issues with large PDFs and Kobo readers? And are there workarounds? I'd like to keep it in PDF, since the text is set in two columns... Best regards Chris

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04-19-2015, 06:13 AM	#2
GeoffR Wizard Posts: 3,821 Karma: 19162882 Join Date: Nov 2012 Location: Te Riu-a-Māui Device: Kobo Glo	I can't guess what is wrong with the PDF, but don't take the "protected by DRM" message too seriously. When a Kobo device tries to open a book and fails, but doesn't know why it failed, then it assumes the failure was because the book is encrypted with DRM. It could just mean the book is corrupted, or there is just something about the book it can't handle.

04-19-2015, 04:22 PM	#5
arspr Dead account. Bye Posts: 587 Karma: 668244 Join Date: Mar 2011 Device: none	I bet that your problem is that your pdf is the NEWEST flavour of them (256-bit AES protected, even if only for certain functions). These pdfs cannot be opened by Kobo, (and neither by Calibre BTW). In older FW versions they even crashed the device. Since 3.12, they just give a wrong error message about DRM protection. You can find the whole story in this thread (which started about a performance drop with other pdfs). If you want to summarize, just jump to this post and continue reading from it.

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