Password protected PDFs no longer displaying correctly

Hi, Support.

First, thanks for an app I’ve really enjoyed using for several years, on both iOS and macOS.

I have an issue I first noticed sometime last year. I use many password protected PDFs, and up until that time they would display correctly, and I had made many notes on many such documents.

Now, when I load those mind maps, and enter the password into MN3 when prompted, I cannot see any of the data in the PDFs - I can see where my excerpts and highlights should be (e.g. a block of green in the position on the page where some words I highlighted ought to exist), but the pages are displayed as completely blank / white, with no words or pictures.

Unfortunately I’m not able to tell which version / update I first noticed the problem with. Nor will I be able to share any of the PDFs.

Starting a completely new mind map with one of the PDFs results in the same behavior.

As I’ve said, I have many notebooks with such PDFs, and thousands of excerpts and highlights, so I’m really hoping that this is fixable. Please let me know if any other troubleshooting steps or information I could provide.

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Hello

You can export a backup without a notebook in the document mode, then delete the PDF, and then use the professional PDF editing app to remove the password, import MarginNote, and finally re-associate the lost documents.

Kind Regards,

Support Team

Thanks for the response - this sounds like a kind of “hack” fix - I may try it, although it would be much better for me to keep the protection on the PDFs. However, I just want to re-state that these password protected PDFs were all working fine with MarginNote for a long time – for years, the same documents – and then stopped working very suddenly, all at once.

It made me think that this was due to a change in the way an update to MarginNote handled protected PDFs. Do you believe nothing changed in MarginNote to cause this issue?

Hello

There may be a bug. If you‘re convenient, you can send us this PDF and the key for testing.

Kind Regards,

Support Team

Unfortunately, as I said in my first post, I am unable to share the documents. I’ll attempt to recreate the issue by creating some new protected documents.