I just bought the PDF version of the 2012 NC Residential Building Code so that I could put it on my iphone & tablets. Once I got it, I unlocked it with the provided serial number but no iOS or Android apps will work with this bullshit encryption. Printing is enabled but printing to a pdf fails everytime. Everything that I can find online is $30 for something that I don't know whether they'll work or not and I'm really not fond of spending another $30 on something that I've already paid $100 for.

Does anyone know of any GOOD options? It's a 20mb+/- file that's 960-ish pages. If it was shorter I'd just print it & scan it but that'd take way too long.

4/2/2012 11:31:55 AM

I'd use something like Nitro PDF reader (pro version readily available on torrent sites) to convert the document to a .docx then just print back to PDF from there.

4/2/2012 11:36:55 AM

upload to google docs?

4/2/2012 11:38:15 AM

^no good. Just uploads as user locked and the password field is still unclickable.

^^ thanks. I'll look for it once I get home.

4/2/2012 11:46:07 AM

Download primopdf and try to print to it...it should create a copy without encryption

And if the print option doesn't work, drag and drop the file to it

[Edited on April 2, 2012 at 11:53 AM. Reason : ]

4/2/2012 11:52:37 AM

Well primopdf made it through all 967 pages without an error. Now I'm just waiting on a save prompt. Task manager shows its still working but it's been 2-3 minutes. Guess I'll run to lunch and see what happened when I get back. Thanks for the suggestions so far.

4/2/2012 12:22:26 PM

Well I finally managed to get it. The file will not open in any other PDF reader so Nitro, Primo, etc. won't work. They'll chug along and get to 99% and then fail. I managed to print it to OneNote but then it was too much for it to handle and it eventually crashed and refused to print it back out to pdf. I finally printed it to a microsoft XPS file and it actually worked. From there I reprinted as pdf and it worked.

Now, anyone know where I can get a massive box of shit to mail to these assholes? It's shit like this that keeps me from giving a damn about piracy.

4/2/2012 4:18:01 PM

Yeesh. Printing it and scanning it in with OCR does a decent job.

4/2/2012 4:45:44 PM

^yeah I would normally do that but this was 967 pages.

4/2/2012 5:45:38 PM

looks like you already got it solved, but i've had similar issues with 300-400 page PDF files, and I've had luck printing multiple 80-90 page sections to PDF, then combining those PDF files into a new document

4/2/2012 6:03:22 PM