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

THANK YOU!!!

Guest — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:29:27 -0500

THANK YOU!!!

Worked like a charm. thanks

Rich — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:19:54 -0500

Worked like a charm.

thanks a bunch!

Thanks, works perfect. I had

Mijo — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 01:10:57 -0500

Thanks, works perfect. I had a lot of files secured with the same password, installed the utilities and made a small script. 15 min and I am done on more than 100 files

Awesome

oldmankit — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 21:09:57 -0600

So simple - worked for me. Thanks a bunch!

special characters in password (qpdf & ubuntu terminal)

Mike — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:16:46 -0600

Hi,

I guess qpdf works very well for most cases, however I'm experiencing a problem where the password contains special characters:

qpdf --password=ÖPViCiYJ --decrypt 1_pw.pdf 1.pdf
1_pw.pdf: invalid password

(Yes, in Adobe Reader the very same password works.)

Any ideas how to enter "Ö" in terminal so that qpdf understands it?

Thanks!

Mike

I did it by using

Guest — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 11:49:11 -0500

I did it by using pdfshuffler, it is a linux tool for deleting,adding,and shuffling pages.

It's also not free and a rip

Guest — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 10:03:18 -0500

It's also not free and a rip off considering qpdf does the same thing at no cost.

Thanks a lot

Deniz Ogut — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:30:12 -0500

Very useful for me.

Thanks!

Kevin at UVic — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:04:22 -0500

Very useful tip. Thanks!

qpdf works for me!

Liberator — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:13:27 -0500

Thanks for this info. qpdf worked perfectly for me.

remove PDF Password

Guest — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 03:22:43 -0500

You can use PDF Password Remover to Reremove password-protection or encryption from the PDF

document. Advanced PDF Password Remover is a free tool which removes encryption from PDF files.

It removes all the basic restrictions on printing, copying and editing the content of PDF files.

It also removes password protection, if any, from the file.

http://www.advancedpdfconverter.com/products/pdfpasswordremover.html

xpdf-utils conflicts with

Guest — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:53:30 -0500

xpdf-utils conflicts with gutaprint packages wich needed for Epsons printers to work.
if you install xpdf-utils you will loose gutaprint

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

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.