townx - Removing a password from a PDF on Linux - Comments

Thanks for clarifying.

elliot — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:31:44 -0500

Thanks for clarifying.

But pdftk needs OWNER

Guest — Mon, 19 May 2008 11:20:03 -0500

But pdftk needs OWNER password and to use the method decribed above you only need USER pass.

Aha, great! I hadn't heard

elliot — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:39:13 -0500

Aha, great! I hadn't heard of that application.

Better use pdftk

Fnor — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 09:52:54 -0500

Pdftk is a packaged on Debian an should be in many other distributions.
If not, it can be downloaded at http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/

apt-get install pdftk
pdftk secured.pdf input_pw foopass output unsecured.pdf

As ps is not used, links are not lost and pdftk can do much more for you.

Removing a password from a PDF on Linux

elliot — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 04:31:26 -0500

I just bought a PDF, legally, from a publisher's website. However, in their wisdom, they decided it would be a good idea to password protect all legally-purchased PDFs. This means that each time you open the PDF using Acrobat Reader, you have to remember and type in the password to read it. (Evince, the built-in PDF viewer in Linux, allows you to permanently save the password, but I tend to use Acrobat as it copes better with some PDFs.)

So, if you know the password for a PDF and want to remove it, you can use the command line tools pdftops and ps2pdf to free your PDF from its chains.

Install pdftops. On Ubuntu, you can do:
apt-get install xpdf-utils
Install ps2pdf. I think this is already included with a default Ubuntu.
Convert the PDF to a postscript file, using the password:
pdftops -upw <password> <file>.pdf
Convert the resulting postscript (which is now sans password) back to a PDF:
ps2pdf <file>.ps

The only thing you lose are any PDF-specific features which don't translate to postscript, e.g. hyperlinks.

Remember, this only works if you know the password for the PDF: it doesn't break the PDF password for you.