PDF XChange Forum

It happens to me that the option to rename the current document is not available for all PDFs.
What is the reason for this? How can I fix it?

Hello hanson.alastor,

I am not sure if this is exactly the same as your situation, but it seems that if the read-only attribute is set for a file, such as in File Explorer, the Rename and Move File commands are disabled and do not appear in the context menu of the document tab, as you have indicated. If this is the cause of your case, then unsetting the read-only attribute should make the command appear in the context menu.

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In Windows, the effect of the read-only attribute on a file is limited to the contents of that file, and the file name and location should be free to change. I am wondering if this behavior of the PDF-XChange Editor is what the developers intended.

Best regards,
rakunavi

Hello,

What Rakunavi describes would be one of the most likely cases. Other situations where this may happen are when the file in question has security in place preventing such edits (files opened from third party file services, like sharepoint or onedrive may have similar restructions), or if the file itself has never been saved, and thus does not have a location or name as of yet. You must save the file to a location, in order to be able to rename the file.
Finally, an extension of what Rakunavi mentioned, sometimes the folder permissions could be at fault. If you have opened the pdf file directly from your email client for example, the PDF may be stored in the mail clients temporary folder, and so the Editor does not have permissions to make such changes.

Other than those, I cannot think of any more cases offhand, but those should cover nearly everything.

Kind regards,

Hello Daniel,

If you open a file with the read-only attribute set in Notepad++, you cannot edit the text content, of course, but unlike the PDF-XChange Editor, the Rename command in the File menu will work and you can rename the file. For your information.

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Best regards,
rakunavi

Hello, rakunavi

That is a good point, I am unsure if this is an intentional decision, or a side effect of the rename system not knowing exactly how the file is marked "read only". In PDF, there are a few ways to "enforce" this more actively than a simple checkbox in the windows properties handler, and in some of those cases, ignoring it could flag the document as being tampered with, which we would not want to do.

I have raised this with the Dev team to see if that is the case here, or if this is simply an oversight at the time the feature was added. I cannot say I am confident that this will be given a very high priority if it is due for a change, but when I hear back, I will let you know.

Kind regards,

Hello, thanks for your answers.

In my case, you are right. The PDF files that I unsuccessfully tried to rename were read-only.

Regards,

Hanson

Hello, hanson.alastor

Youll be happy to hear, this should be resolved in the upcoming build! Keep an eye out for build 394!

Kind regards,