Looking for app to strip password protection 1

[Foamcow]

I have a client with a large number of PDFs that they have created.
They need me to extract the text content from these files to use on a website I am building but the only files they can supply me are created with restrictions on copy/paste.
They are creating the files using Pagemaker and are unaware of how the protection is being applied let alone remove it.

Does anyone know of a low cost app (ideally OSX, but Windows will do) that will let me batch process the files to remove the copy/paste restriction?

I've got a demo of something that will do it but there is no batch mode and it's going to take forever to manually process each one.

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<honk>*:O)</honk>

Tyres: Mine's a pint of the black stuff.
Mike: You can't drink a pint of Bovril.

 

[eugenetyson]

The PDF security is applied during the creation of the PDF. When your client is creating the pdf then there would be a Security section in the PDF dialog box. They just need to make sure that no security is being applied.

You could try

http://www.zamzar.com

to upload the pdf and convert them to rtf.

Or you could simply get your client to export the text from pagemaker as .rtf.

http://www.doozler.blogspot.com/

 

[Foamcow]

Easier said than done

There are around 300 files and the client has no clue either what the password might be or how they are applying it.

I've given up on the route of getting them to remake the files - would take them too long anyway even if they knew how to change the settings in Pagemaker.

I actually found a Windows app that let me do the removal via the contextual menu. So it was just a matter of selecting a load of files and right clicking... then clicking like mad to clear the resulting windows

Sort of a faux batch mode. But it worked ok and I managed to do the whole lot of files in just a few minutes.

Thanks for the tip about zamzar though. That may be useful in future.

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<honk>*:O)</honk>

Tyres: Mine's a pint of the black stuff.
Mike: You can't drink a pint of Bovril.

 

[eugenetyson]

Well I could have recommended an app to do it, but it costs a bunch and it's a pro's tool so it wouldn't be much good to you after you've stripped the password. As I said it costs quite a lot.

http://www.doozler.blogspot.com/

 

[Foamcow]

For my purposes (I only wanted to be able to extract the text) I discovered that I could use OSX's Automator.
I made an app using the built in "Extract PDF text" droplet.
This managed to circumvent the PDF security with no problem and processed about 100 files in around 1 second.

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<honk>*:O)</honk>

Tyres: Mine's a pint of the black stuff.
Mike: You can't drink a pint of Bovril.