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For my studies I often receive some PDFs with Information from my professors.

Unfortunately, some of them think they do really secret stuff, so they happen to password-protect their PDFs… What they do not think about is, that entering the password everytime I only want to lookup something, is pretty annoying, after all. Indeed, not even spotlight is able to search through these PDFs, thus it wouldn’t find anything in there.

Well, lately I discovered a way to remove this password-protection using Preview.app. Note: Only works with known password!

1. Open PDF with Preview.app and enter password

2. Show Sidebar, if not already visible

3. Right-click page-preview of any page and select “Save a Copy to Folder…”

4. Choose “PDF” as type and do not activate encryption

5. Done.

And here we have a comparison between before and after the process in finder:

Well, and now even spotlight will be able to index and search-through this pdf.

Only drawback of this solution: It won’t work if the original author of the pdf not only set a “read”-password but also a “copy from”-password. Then the only thing you’ll get is a blank pdf, which is pretty useless…

•  German

Tags: Apple, entfernen, Mac OS X, Passwort entfernen PDF, PDF, Preview, remove password pdf, Vorschau

Dieser Eintrag wurde am Monday, 12. July 2010 um 19:13 verfasst und in Apple, Howto, Mac, OS X eingeordnet. Sie können die Antworten mit diesem RSS 2.0 Feed verfolgen. Sie können einen Kommentar verfassen, oder einen Trackback von Ihrer Website verlinken.