Annoyed trying to download a PDF

[Tom_ZeCat]

I signed up for an online course. It opens PDFs within FireFox or Chrome via Flash. I want to download the PDFs so that I can study the material regardless of whether I have an Internet connection. It's not working for me. I right clicked and tried save as, but it tried to save an html page. I looked for other commands and did not find them. I looked at the page source and searched for the PDF, but did not find it. They really don't want their PDF downloaded I guess, but I paid for this course and should get to use it regardless of whether I'm connected to the Internet. I found a FireFox plugin for downloading PDFs, but it complained that I have FireFox 36 and the plugin doesn't work for this version.

I'm not going to do anything shady like uploading their material into a torrent. It's for my study, and only my study, as I've paid to do. Any other ideas?

[Rod J]

When previewed in Firefox do you see the buttons on the right?

The one with the down arrow is the download button. If it's not there maybe the author of the PDF has disabled this function somehow? I'm not sure what you could do in that case.

[SecretCode]

It opens PDFs within FireFox or Chrome via Flash.

This is probably the problem. They've coded a viewer in Flash so that none of the standard methods of retrieving the PDF are accessible. scribd.com and Google Books do things like this (so I boycott them).

What's the site? Have you asked them for help? ... Have you asked for your money back?

If it was Javascript it might be possible to study the code and find a bare URL for the PDF, but I don't know if this is possible with Flash. I suppose you could run it through an http packet analyser, or a web proxy server, to see what files are retrieved ... could be difficult and tedious though.

[dequire]

Perhaps there's a way via the browser settings to tell the browser to open PDF's in Okular instead of the built-in PDF viewer. Then they could be easily saved and renamed for later use. IIRC there used to be a way to do this easily in Firefox, though I can not test this ATM. Additionally, if you can print the PDF once it is opened in the browser, it should be easy to use the built-in Print to PDF feature to ascertain the document as a PDF file that can be stored on your hard drive.

EDIT: Additionally, perhaps this post from the esteemed Steve Riley can help. Sometimes, timing is everything!

[claydoh]

I agree with SecretCode, they are likely using flash to specifically prevent people from downloading the course files so that they don't end up online for free.

[Tom_ZeCat]

When previewed in Firefox do you see the buttons on the right?
[ATTACH=CONFIG]5899[/ATTACH]
The one with the down arrow is the download button. If it's not there maybe the author of the PDF has disabled this function somehow? I'm not sure what you could do in that case.

Nope, don't see those buttons. When the course material is loading, I see an icon that says "powered by zmags" and then after it's loaded, it has a zmags.com link at the top instead of the original web site's link. I have an icon at the top for "table of contents" and one for "enter full screen mode" and that's it.

I'm going to study the SteveRiley post and see if there's a way I can make the pdf auto-load in Okular. I'm sure they are just trying to prevent piracy. It's a $500 course. I'm not going to be a warez prick and upload it to some torrent. I just want to be able to access the material anytime/anywhere. I've invested a lot in this.

[SecretCode]

Another possibility is that the site doesn't just obfuscate downloading a PDF, it doesn't download it at all, instead serving up pages at a time in a different format. You might be out of luck.

You should still ask the people you've paid money to to give you value though!