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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?

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