How to highlight text in a protected PDF file

If you are one of those who study online, you know that one of the materials you have are PDF files. However, many teachers try to protect their documents so that their texts are not copied or stolen. This makes it impossible to highlight unless you print it. Can it be? We know how to highlight text in a protected PDF file.

And since we want you to know this and have the right tools to work with them, we will talk about the possible solutions you need to achieve. Go get it!

Why is the PDF file protected?

Imagine that you have created an important, innovative, creative text or document. The problem is that you have to send it to many people, regardless of whether they have the same status or different ones. The last thing you want is for your ideas to be copied. And if so, let it not be literal.

So many choose to send them with protection to prevent people from copying. So you won’t get a job with your writing or anything like that.

Actually, protecting your PDF file is a good thing, but it also doesn’t free you from these problems because there are tools that can bypass the lock and thus get a fully editable document. But the truth is that it gives some security to those who work with them.

Why highlight text in a PDF file

The reason you want to highlight texts varies. It is possible that you forgot to select part of the document and do not have the original at hand or the program in which you created it.

Perhaps you are a student and want to highlight parts of your study notes.

Either way, highlighting or underlining is used to highlight parts of a document. You could say it’s a summary because you point out the parts that are most important or the parts you need to remember better.

To do this, many documents like doc, docx, txt allow you to do it easily. Also in an editable PDF. But what about a protected one?

Although it takes a bit more effort to achieve this, it can also be done. And we will explain as below.

How to highlight text in a protected PDF file

To be able to highlight text in a protected PDF file, the first thing you should remember is that you need to turn it off, which means it must be a fully editable PDF in order to work with it.

You accomplish this in many ways, but almost all of them would require the use of some sort of tool.

SwifDoo PDF

SwifDoo PDF is a full-featured PDF program and one that will allows you to edit PDF files more easily and quickly.

You must take into account that according to the standard, if you are not the author or creator of the document, you should not be able to edit it, but you must contact that person to get it.

Additionally, a protected PDF file can be protected in two different ways:

A password that can be removed. How? Go to Protect/Decrypt. In many cases, it will ask for the password you had to delete it.

In the case of server-based security policies, where the author himself or the server administrator can change them.

To highlight a PDF file, simply choose “Annotate” tag, then “Highlight” feature in the portal.

Online tools

Before we give you some examples of websites that help you unlock PDF files, we need to make two clarifications:

On the one hand, we are talking about a third-party tool, which means that you are going to upload this document to a server over which you no longer have control. If this is very important, we do not recommend it (and it is better to try with the tools you install on your computer like SwifDoo). 

Why? Well, you don’t know what might happen to this document. You shouldn’t do this unless you trust the site and know that it will remove it when you stop working with it.

Additionally, the tools cannot always unlock the document. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And even if they do, they may end up deleting the text, so keep that in mind.

Having said all this, some of the tools we can recommend are:

• Small PDF
• ilovePDF
• PDF2GO
• SodaPDF

Almost all of them work the same way: you have to upload the document, enter the password (on some sites) and wait for the editable file to be returned. Others don’t require you to use a password, they try to unlock it without it (unless it’s heavily encrypted).

From protected PDF to editable PDF

Once you have it secured, the next step will be to edit it. And for this you also have options (since you won’t always be able to edit the PDF file with the program).

There are many other options, but with these you will already be able to highlight text in a protected PDF file.