After seeing GOGs statements about no drm I was surprised when I went to print off the included manual and was unable to because the pdf was locked down.

did gog intend to lock down the manual? if so why?

No idea what you are going on about here. I have the GOG Earth 2150 Trilogy and Earth 2160 and all the extras for them. I just checked out the pdf manuals and I was able to open them and open the print dialog without any issues at all.

The issue was with earth 2140 (sorry I forgot to mention which game) purchased from gog.

I opened the manual pdf in the games install folder and was very surprised to find printing was locked out. The seperately downloadable copy of the manual seems to have the same issue.

While there are third party tools that can strip the protection it really shouldn't be necessary to do that just to print out the manual of a game i've bought.

Did you send them a support message? They might have just thrown it in without checking it.

I can confirm that the manual is locked.