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

The pdftops and pstopdf

Guest — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:38:37 -0500

The pdftops and pstopdf approach is sufficient. It keeps the text and is searchable. Page size is the same, everything is the same except now it doesn't ask me for a password. No need to buy a commercial application that may not even run on Wine.

nice

Guest — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:44:59 -0600

Thanks for the tip :)

Just reprint as PDF?

Lancer — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:39:55 -0600

Not quite. A lot of secure PDFs will not print even after a password has been used successfully to open them.

As an Ubuntu user, I found the qpdf package mentioned above to be the best solution;
qpdf --password=********* --decrypt secure_version.pdf new_derypted_version.pdf

That's a tip FTW. Thx man.

fscosta — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 15:08:38 -0600

That's a tip FTW. Thx man. How I'm not thought this before?

Thanks elliot.

Guest101 — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:42:25 -0600

Thanks elliot.

Thank you!

jarlz0r — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:20:15 -0600

Thank you!

This helped me

Michel — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:16:17 -0500

This helped me ... Thanks

+1 for qpdf

Guest — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:15:19 -0500

qpdf ftw! works like a charm, and keeps all the fancy pdf attributes like index etc.

Ubuntu

Guest — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:21:31 -0500

I don't know about the other distro's but in Ubuntu but if you know the password you can simply open up the PDF and then print to file (pdf)

Thanks

Eka — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:56:41 -0500

It was really handy thanks

Glad to be of assistance :)

elliot — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:07:08 -0600

Glad to be of assistance :)

opensuse works great

Felipe Alvarez — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:40:47 -0600

opensuse 11.1 KDE version has ALL of those programs already pre-installed. This tut worked perfectly for my password protected PDF. Thanks for posting!

Felipe

Sounds like a good solution.

elliot — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:39:25 -0500

Sounds like a good solution.

wine app

Guest — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 04:34:57 -0500

Hi, I tried using the PDF to PS then PS to PDF method but I found the resulting pdf quality unsatisfactory, ( loss of bookmarks navigation, page sizing wrong, resolution pixelated etc...)

I ended up using this windows app:

http://www.a-pdf.com/security/restrictions_remover.htm

and installed it on Ubuntu under Wine ( https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wine )

The pdf tool trial version is fully functional for 15 days

It worked fine and was a very simple process.

The resulting PDF was unlocked and a perfect clone of the original.

Note: I used this on an E-Book I've just purchased and have the rights to. I just don't like entering my password everytime I open it! :-)

what permissions

Adolix Split & Merge PDF — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:23:43 -0500

does this pdftops,pstopdf scheme allow me to modify the permissions of the file? for example, if the PDF does not allow me to print me, can I modify this setting?

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.