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I have written my thesis in latex and this thesis contains 240 pages. The size of this thesis is 5.21 MB. However, I am unable to check this pdf on Turnitin. Turnitin is not yielding any specific error but simply does not process this file after submission.

Can you please tell me how can I make this Latex generated pdf compatible for Turnitin plagiarism checker?

Chandan Gautam
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  • No idea about Turnitin, but if it's a file size issue and you are only interested in a textual comparison, you can probably pass the [draft]option to whichever package you use for images, see here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/49277/what-does-the-draft-mode-change – LokiRagnarok Oct 18 '19 at 11:04
  • File size should not be an issue because I have checked a larger size file than this on Turnitin. Even, Turnitin has also mentioned that it can check up to 40 MB file. – Chandan Gautam Oct 18 '19 at 11:14
  • Okay. https://help.turnitin.com/feedback-studio/turnitin-website/student/submitting-a-paper/file-requirements.htm says "Turnitin will not accept PDF image files, forms, or portfolios, files that do not contain highlightable text (e.g. a scanned file - usually an image), documents containing multiple files or files created with software other than Adobe Acrobat®." I suspect that means PDF/A, so I suggest you research how to transform your document to a PDF/A format (I am, however, not sure enough to give this as an answer.) – LokiRagnarok Oct 18 '19 at 11:24
  • Thanks for your help. I am also looking for that option but unable to find. Turnitin mentions that they do not support pdflatex. – Chandan Gautam Oct 18 '19 at 11:25
  • I've had students produce PDF from TeX and upload successfully to Turnitin, even though submission is set to only accept files it can process. Has something changed? – cfr Oct 18 '19 at 14:42
  • Also, I regularly have students upload PDFs produced using other word processors on Macs, as opposed to Adobe Acrobat. All of these get originality reports. I suspect this is more of a "if it isn't Adobe Acrobat and it doesn't work, it isn't our problem" than a genuine "Adobe Acrobat only". Ridiculous rule anyway. Could you convert your file to .ps? – cfr Oct 18 '19 at 15:38
  • I also used to check the journal or conference papers or small reports, which were written in Latex. Although, Turnitin mentioned that it does not support pdflatex, but I never got any issue. However, when I tried to check thesis then I encountered this issue. – Chandan Gautam Oct 18 '19 at 15:55

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The key is to follow the instructions in this related question: Produce PostScript file in TeXShop on MacOS X

The question is specific to TexShop on macOS, but the idea of first generating the .ps file then converting to .pdf using Adobe Distiller applies more generally.

https://helpx.adobe.com/au/acrobat/using/creating-pdfs-acrobat-distiller.html

If you don't have Distiller, you could also try Ghostscript http://slantchev.ucsd.edu/edu/latex/latex-pdf.html

TurnItIn isn't the only software that struggles with PDF files generated from pdflatex, but it does seem to be the most fussy.

Matt
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