EDGAR Ban on Automated PDFing
- Sean O'Shea
- Oct 20, 2021
- 1 min read
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.