I work for the Lehigh Library and Technology Services Help Desk. I am trying to assist a professor who wants to highlight text in a PDF article that he has downloaded. The highlight tool and comment tools appear to be disabled (greyed out), although the document properties seem to indicate that they shouldn't be. I don't appear to have any problem highlighting other documents. If this document is secured to prevent highlighting, how would I know?
The program is Acrobat Reader 2017 (Version 2017.011.30142 for Windows 10 Enterprise Version 1809, 64-bit). The Security Properties for the document indicate (a) "Security Method: No Security", (b) "Can be Opened by: All versions of Acrobat", and (c) "Commenting: Allowed" (in fact, all of the operations listed, except "Document Assembly" and "Page Extraction" are listed as allowed). I take this to mean that highlighting should work. I have read other posts about the PDF being images (this one seems to be text--I can select the text, I just can't do anything to it), about multiple documents being open at once (I was careful about this), and about comments being disallowed (see above). I'd like to have an answer that is an improvement on "that feature in Acrobat just doesn't work sometimes, for no apparent reason, but you won't know until you try, and you can't get a clue as to why". Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.
Doug Reese