If you are one of those who studies online, you know that one of the materials you have is PDF's. However, many teachers tend to protect their documents so that their texts are not copied or stolen. And that causes that it cannot be underlined unless you print it. Or can it be? Us we know how to highlight text in protected PDF.
And since we want you to know it too, and that you have the right tools to work with them, we are going to talk about the possible solutions you have to achieve it. Go for it?
Why is a PDF protected?
Imagine that you have created an important, innovative, creative text or document. And the problem is that you have to send it to many people, whether they are of your same status (professors, researchers...) or of a different one (bosses, students...). The last thing you want is for your ideas to be copied. And, if they do, let it not be literally.
So many they decide to send them with protection to prevent people from copying. So you don't find jobs with your texts or anything like that.
Actually, the protection of a PDF is a good thing, but it doesn't free you from these problems either, since there are tools that can bypass the blocking, and thus obtain the fully editable document. But it is true that it gives a little security to those who work with them.
Why highlight text in a PDF
The reason why you want to highlight texts is varied. It may be that you have forgotten to highlight a part of the document and do not have the original, or the program with which you created it, at hand.
Or it may be that you are a student and you want to highlight parts of the notes to study.
Anyway, highlighting, or underlining, is used to highlight a part of a document. We could say that it is by way of summary, since you point out the parts that are most important or those that you have to remember better.
To do this, many documents, such as doc, docx, txt... allow you to do it easily. In an editable PDF too. But what about a protected one?
Although it requires a little more effort to achieve it, it can also be done. And we explain how below.
How to highlight text in protected pdf
To be able to highlight text in a protected PDF, the first thing to keep in mind is that you need to unprotect it., that is, it must be a fully editable PDF so that you can work with it.
You achieve this in multiple ways, but in almost all of them it would involve using some tool.
Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat is the "official" program for PDFs and the one that will allow you to edit PDF files the easiest and fastest.
You must take into account that, according to the norm, if you are not the author or creator of the document, you should not be able to edit it, but you would have to contact that person to get it.
In addition, a protected PDF can be protected in two different ways:
- By a password, which can be removed. How? Going to Tools/Protect/Encrypt/Remove security. In many cases it will ask for the password you had in order to remove it.
- For a server-based security policy, where it is the author himself, or the server administrator, who can change it.
Online tools
Before giving you some examples of online pages that help you unlock PDF's, we must make two clarifications:
On the one hand, that We are talking about a third-party tool, which means that you are going to upload that document to a server over which you no longer have control. If it is very important, we do not recommend it (and it is better to try with tools that you install on your computer). Why? Well, because you don't know what can happen to that document. Unless you trust the page, and you know that they delete it when you stop working with it, you shouldn't do it.
On the other hand, the tools do not always manage to unlock the document. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. And even if they do, they can end up unmarking the text, so keep that in mind.
Having said all this, some of the tools that we can recommend are:
- SmallPDF.
- iLovePDF.
- PDF2GO.
- SodaPDF.
- Online2PDF.
Almost all of them work the same way: you have to upload the document, enter the password (on some pages) and wait for the editable file to be returned. Others don't require you to use the password, they try to unlock it without it (unless it's heavily encrypted).
From protected PDF to editable PDF
Once you have it unprotected, the next step would be to edit it. And for this you also have options (because you will not always be able to edit the PDF with a program). For example:
- Edge. If you use Windows 10 or 11 it is an option. You just have to open the pdf with that browser and select the text to highlight. As soon as you do, a submenu will appear that will allow you to underline with colors.
- Adobe Acrobat. It would be the best program to change text, underline, put images... in other words, to edit the entire pdf. To do this, you just have to open the file in Acrobat DC, hit the “Edit PDF” tool on the right panel and use the tools you have. Once finished, you save it and that's it.
- ApowerPDF. It is a software that is installed on the computer and that modifies texts, images, watermarks, and you can even change the order of the pages. Of course, the free version is very limited and if you want to do a lot of editing you will have to go to the paid one.
- libreoffice. It is a document editor (word, excel...) but you can also edit PDFs. The vast majority of them open them and allow you to edit it as if you were working with a doc.
- PDF2go. If you don't want to install anything on your computer, this is an online PDF editor where you can easily highlight text. You also have other options.
- Foxit PDF Reader & Editor. Ideal if what you want is to highlight text in a PDF but from your mobile. It is only for iOS but the best there is. It has support in several languages and it is also free.
- PDF reader and editor. The option for Android (although it is also on iOS). Well, underline, edit, sign...
There are many more options but with these you will already be able to highlight text in a protected PDF. Do you have other suggestions? We are open.