Saturday, April 26, 2014

How To Unlock a PDF File for FREE.

I have seen a lot of comments and searches by people who need to unlock a locked PDF.

There are also a lot of paid products scattered across the Internet which claim to be able to unlock your PDFs for you, they all fail to do the one thing they seem to promise.

All of them are able to unlock the permissions to be able print or alter the PDFs but not to unlock the actual file if it is password protected for access.

When you try to unlock a PDF which is password protected for access using one of these tools they all ask you for the password.

I don't know how to get around this problem except for one simple way which works 100% of the time.

You still need to have the password but only the first time you open the file.

Here are the simple steps:-

  1. Open the PDF using the password.
  2. Print the PDF as a PDF using a tool like PDF Factory or similar, Mac users have this built in the print function.
  3. In the settings save the PDF without any security.
  4. Now you have a copy of the original file which is unprotected.
Too hard?  I didn't think so.

Bottom line here, if you have the password you don't need the tools, if you don't have the password the tools can't help you.

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