[open-science] Removing watermarks from pdfs (pdfparanoia)

Tue Feb 5 21:09:44 UTC 2013

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 8:20 PM, Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com> wrote:

> How about removing those pesky watermarks from pdfs? Sometimes they
> completely obfuscate the contents of a paper we're trying to read, or
> sometimes they have more sinister purposes.
>
> PDF2SVG should be able to do this (http://bitbucket.org/petermr/pdf2svg).
It should also remove the side annotations about which library the PDF was
downloaded from. Send me one and I'll see.

Of course if it's encrypted or DRM'ed there isn't much it can do

> Working proof of concept:
>
> https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia
> https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pdfparanoia
>
> Discussion history:
> https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front/t/c68964cf55d8f6fa
>
> People who could theoretically benefit from this:
>
> http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Authorized+licensed+use+limited+to%22
>
> http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="Redistribution+subject+to+SEG+license+or+copyright"<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Redistribution+subject+to+SEG+license+or+copyright%22>
> http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="Redistribution+subject+to+AIP"<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Redistribution+subject+to+AIP%22>
>
> http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="Downloaded+from+http%3A%2F%2Fpubs.acs.org+on"<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Downloaded+from+http%3A%2F%2Fpubs.acs.org+on%22>
> http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="Downloaded+*+*+2001..2013+to+*"<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Downloaded+*+*+2001..2013+to+*%22>
>
> To get source code:
>
> git clone git://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia.git
>
> To install:
>
> sudo pip install pdfparanoia
>
> or:
>
> sudo easy_install pdfparanoia
>
> Right now there's IEEE and AIP support. I need more samples to work with.
>
> - Bryan
> http://heybryan.org/
> 1 512 203 0507
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>

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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