How in the Tech

Lift those PDF print restrictions

By Adam Myers ⋅ February 8, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Windows

PDF, or portable document format, is ubiquitous on the Internet – every platform has an appropriate PDF viewer. The file format is an excellent way to ensure your colleague views the document in the style and fonts you designed it with – something a .doc file doesn’t cope well with, and that’s assuming they have the capability to open DOC files!

Generally speaking, once a document has been PDF’d it is uneditable – therefor it’s often used as a deliverance of a final “product”. This quasi type of security is understood and accepted but PDF has the capability to leverage further restrictions. PDFs can be created to disallow printing or copy/pasting of content and that’s where the delightfulness of PDF ends. While mother nature may be happy about not wasting paper, printing of documents to read away from the computer is commonplace. If you haven’t been affected by this limitation you probably just haven’t been using a computer long enough – your time will come! However, since you are reading this it’s safe to assume you’ve been bitten by the restrictions.

PDF Password Remover is a free, for personal use, Windows application that can aid in helping you reclaim your full use of a protected PDF file. Once installed, it only takes a few clicks to remove copy, edit, or print restrictions the original author may have placed. Point it to your PDF file, or files for batch processing, define where to save the newly created PDF, and click Start – it only takes a few seconds to strip out any restriction. Now that’s more like it!