Skip to content
Blog Convert copy protected PDFs to unprotected, using two simple commands in Ubuntu

Convert copy protected PDFs to unprotected, using two simple commands in Ubuntu

Use two simple commands to convert a protected pdf into an unprotected pdf.

Here in this example i assume the protected pdf file name to be ‘protected.pdf’.

Now open your terminal and type.

$ pdftops protected.pdf out.ps

$ pstopdf out.ps out.pdf

The out.pdf will be your unprotected PDF.

If you don’t have pstopdf and pdftops installed then type this at terminal to install them.

$ sudo apt-get install context

3 thoughts on “Convert copy protected PDFs to unprotected, using two simple commands in Ubuntu”

  1. I’ve tried it on a DRM PDF and it doesn’t work. It prompted messages like

    **** This file uses an unknown security handler.
    **** The file was produced by:
    **** ……

    Error: ….

  2. Interesting, so I tried it and pdftops complains about not having the correct password. I wonder if it is version dependant?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.