A small ticket to share a convenient command-line tool for crimping pdf. I recently had a specific need to transfer the password protection of the document. My reader of pdf being in the end only a mere reader, impossible to find in the menus, the option “to remove the protection of the document ” or something of the kind.
Remove the protection of a pdf with Qpdf
So to end the suspense, the small name of this utility is QPDF. It is installed base under ubuntu. Otherwise for those who wish to clone directly, the github page is available here
Cool I will be able to easily crack PDF passwords ??
Attention, I already see little budding crackers say “cool, vla a tool to easily fade password”. If you’re going to want to do that, I can understand, we’ve all already lost a password in our life Turn instead to pdfcrack.
Not here in our case, it will simply matter to remove the protection of the pdf to avoid having to retype the password at each opening. It can be quickly tedious and risky in the long run if you lose the password.
A best practice would be to host the file locally on an encrypted partition or on a private cloud but that is another story. So in our example, we must already know the password that protects the document and we also consider that we do not have adobe tools.
The magic command
So to do this, type in a terminal:
qpdf –password=PASSWORD –decrypt fichierVerrouille.pdf fichierDeverrouille.pdf
To go further with Qpdf
We can do a lot of things with qpdf . So for those who would like to extract, merge, repair pdf, this thread gives the most useful commands.
I prefer the graphic mode, it is possible?
Finally, for those who preferred a graphical tool, I tell you right away you would be disappointed by Qpdfview . The only advantage I see is that it allows to annotate its pdf , convenient and feature that does not run the streets in the drives under linux. But for the rest, it has almost no editing option.