Download publicly visible sharepoint doc?

April 6, 2022 4:34 PM

Our college newspaper is trying to download a publicly visible PDF posted on the district website. Alas, they can't right click or even print it. We can read it. but that's all.

Is there a way they can download it, or copy the text, or even just print it?

Here's the URL
https://email4cd-my.sharepoint.com/personal/swarrier454_email_4cd_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?id=%2Fpersonal%2Fswarrier454%5Femail%5F4cd%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FCPRA%20requests%2FDOC%20J%2E%20Sloan%5Fs%20Summary%20of%20Findings%20for%20Response%20to%202%5F19%5F22%20CPRA%20Request%20%28REDACTED%29%2EPDF&parent=%2Fpersonal%2Fswarrier454%5Femail%5F4cd%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FCPRA%20requests&ga=1

posted by cccorlew to Technology (11 answers total)

I can’t access that pdf without an account. It is possible to lock down access to a share point pdf to view only- and it’s probably not actually a pdf but a rendering of it. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from taking screenshots of the sharepoint doc and turning it into your own PDF.
posted by rockindata at 5:01 PM on April 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

most of the time, when you view a .pdf, a copy is stored in C:\Users\%YourUserName\AppData\Local\Temp, so check there.
Make it larger and get a screenshot/ take a picture.
posted by theora55 at 5:39 PM on April 6, 2022

Sharepoint has built-in web-based viewers for several popular formats, including PDF, and it's very likely that if you aren't seeing the usual UI for downloading, that whoever posted the link has restricted downloading and is forcing you to use the web viewer only. You could take screenshots, perhaps.

Seconding that I can't access the link even after signing in with a Microsoft account, so it's very likely not as public as you imagine it to be.
posted by Aleyn at 5:43 PM on April 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I would just screenshot it and print or share the screenshot.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 6:51 PM on April 6, 2022

You might fire up theBrowser's own "Inspector" on that page, and then see if there is an actual media url which made the request for the PDF into the PDF viewing page. That might be able to be used to make the download happen.
posted by nickggully at 7:38 PM on April 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks all! I didn't realize that my URL would fail without being logged into the college system. Sorry.
Screen shots aren't the best answer for us. We'd like to copy/paste and the documents are many pages.
I'll try the other solutions listed.
posted by cccorlew at 7:59 PM on April 6, 2022

In PowerShell:

$url = 'https://email4cd-my.sharepoint.com/personal/swarrier454_email_4cd_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?id=%2Fpersonal%2Fswarrier454%5Femail%5F4cd%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FCPRA%20requests%2FDOC%20J%2E%20Sloan%5Fs%20Summary%20of%20Findings%20for%20Response%20to%202%5F19%5F22%20CPRA%20Request%20%28REDACTED%29%2EPDF'

Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing -UseDefaultCredentials -Uri $url -OutFile "C:\SOME PATH\cpra.pdf"
posted by Lanark at 3:12 AM on April 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also could be that the source organization has imposed some type of Microsoft DLP or Info Protection policy to prevent download of the file. ??
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 4:57 AM on April 7, 2022

→ In PowerShell:

Needs active Microsoft login credentials. Otherwise, the output file contains the login portal HTML
posted by scruss at 5:24 AM on April 7, 2022

If you have to resort to screenshots, Adobe Acrobat does have a halfway decent OCR, so it'll convert the images to text. You'll want to carefully proofread.
posted by telophase at 8:05 AM on April 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Print it to a PDF (both MacOS and Windows 10 have this built in). This could result in a better quality copy than a screenshot. Might even be indistinguishable in quality from the original, if Sharepoint is rendering it using SVG.
posted by neckro23 at 2:38 PM on April 7, 2022