How to remove the password from a PDF?
I have a password protected PDF file. I know the password but in order to share the file, I have to remove the password from the PDF and share an unprotected copy. How can I do this in Ubuntu with or without the GUI?
The easiest way GUI (recommended for novice)
Open the protected file and use ctrl+p or use print option to print the file, now save the file as pdf.
Using Command line
If you have pdftk already installed you can skip step1
Step 0: To check if Pdftk is already installed
sudo apt list | grep pdftk
If output contains '[installed]' tag with pdftk then you can skip step1 i.e if the output is like this
pdftk/xenial 2.02-4 amd64 [installed]
Step 1: Install pdftk
sudo apt-get install pdftk
Step 2: Run following command
pdftk /path/to/input.pdf input_pw <yourpassword> output out.pdf
If you don't want to install pdftk there is another utility qpdf which is automatically installed (at least on 16.04 which I am using)
To use qpdf for generating unsecured pdf run following command.
qpdf -password=<your-password> -decrypt /path/to/secured.pdf out.pdf
For detailed information take a look at this HTG tutorial
I tried this in ubuntu mate 19.04:
sudo apt-get install qpdf
qpdf --password=YOURPASSWORD-HERE --decrypt input.pdf output.pdf
Source
sudo apt-get install pdftk
pdftk input.pdf output output.pdf user_pw YOURPASSWORD-HERE
This takes your input.pdf
, removes the passwords and exports it as output.pdf
.
You may want to take a look here to explore additional mehods.
Rising the topic from the dead a little bit here (but I am a new Linux user, so...);
- Anyhow, I also used the file for which I had known the password. But I used "Master PDF Editor 5" (unregistered, free version) to remove the password (File - Properties - Security - No Encription).
- However, since "Master PDF Editor 5" leaves the watermark (which I personally, do not mind), I re-opened (the now unlocked file) in Libre Office Draw and removed the watermark.
- I exported the file in PDF, which additionally resulted in tremendous compression without any losses. It was a very simple file; one sheet only, with text in the table, but the above process reduced the size from 70-ish KB to 22-ish KB.