EDGAR Ban on Automated PDFing

Be careful when generating PDFs of company filings on the Securities Exchange Commission's EDGAR site. While all filings are publicly available without the need to have a registered account, the S.E.C. has measures which prevent the automatic collection of the filings of public companies.

Even if you attempt to create a PDF of a filing with an add-in tool in a browser, you may not get the PDF you thought you would.

Instead the resulting PDF will be a notice from the S.E.C. that the request to download the filing was made with a restricted automated tool.

While the FoxIt add-in for Chrome isn't really an automated tool (I was using it to generate a PDF one filing at a time) the EDGAR site determines that it is one.

Try writing the same filing to a PDF by going to File . . . Print instead.