Q: I am getting a “Permission Denied” error when I try to enter the license key in PDF Studio. How can I activate my copy?

A: To be able to save the license key and user settings and preferences, PDF Studio needs to save files under your user home directory. The user home directory is the directory where you as a user should have all permissions, for instance, /users/johnsmith. Sometimes when upgrading from an older OS to a newer version or when copying files from another user account, privileges get modified and users no longer have permissions to write in their own user home directory. This is not an issue that was created by PDF Studio and this can lead to other issues with your system (there can be issues with Preview for instance). To check this, you can try to drag and drop a file in your user home directory and see how your Mac reacts. Potential resources:

  • We also found this interesting link on cnet about Resetting Home Folder Permissions on Mac.
  • For Mac OSX Lion, repairing permissions from the Disk Utility app doesn’t repair the users file permissions as explained in this post on osxdaily.
  • There is also a free app called Batchmod to adjust permissions on a Mac through a simple interface (we have not tried this but it was recommended on an discussions forum on apple.com).

If the above suggestions do not work, first try these other suggestions, and then contact Apple to resolve this issue as this is a setup problem on your Mac. Every user should have permission to write to their user directory.

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