How can I remove the printing protection from password-protected PDF files? [closed]

Question

How can I remove the printing protection from password-protected PDF files?

Answer 1

When PDF documents are visible but not printable there's an easy workaround when you are using GNU/Linux.

To do that, you have to use the two step procedure:

1. Print the pdf to postscript

2. Revert back to normal pdf file

   $ pdftops [your_protected_pdf_document.pdf] out.ps
   
   $ pstopdf [out.ps] broken_protection_pdf_document.pdf 
   

And it's done. There is no more password protectin for your pdf document.

Answer 2

See the answer in pdftk and qpdf to reset PDF commenting security:

Copied from the other answer (written by Kurt Pfeifle)

The command qpdf --decrypt input.pdf output.pdf removes 
the 'owner' password. But it does only work, if there is 
no 'user' password set.

Once the owner password is removed, the output.pdf should 
already have unset all security protection and have allowed 
commenting. Needless to run your extra pdftk ... command then... 
BTW, your allow parameter in your pdftk call will not work the 
way you quoted your command. The allow permissions will only be
applied if you also...

    ...either specify an encryption strength
    ...or give a user or an owner password

Try the following to find out the detailed security settings of the file(s):

qpdf --show-encryption input.pdf
qpdf --show-encryption output.pdf

Example:

qpdf --decrypt crypted.pdf --password=myP@sswor!D uncrypted.pdf