Seeking OSX app for removal of Password protection on PDFs

[Foamcow]

Does anyone know of a low cost application that can batch process a number of PDFs to remove password protection which prevents copy/paste operations?

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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.

 

[twiSSt]

Have a look here - not an app that will do it in batch mode, but a start.

Or this -

http://www.guapdf.com/.

Twist

===========================================
Everything will be OK in the end.
If it's not OK, then it's not the end

 

[Foamcow]

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

Thanks anyway, much appreciated. It's the batch mode that was the problem.

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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.

 

[jpadie]

@foamcow

a potential alternative would be to use php and fpdf + fpdfI. I have not tried this but a brief gander at the manual suggests that it's pretty simple to use. you would just establish a directory walker and for each pdf just do something like this

$pdf = new fpdfi();
$count = $pdf->setSourceFile($filename);
for ($i=0; $i<$count; $i++){
 $tmp = $pdf->importPage($i);
 $pdf->AddPage();
 $pdf->useTemplate($tmp, 10, 10, 10, 90);
 $pdf->output('unencrypted_'.$filename,'D');
}

 

[Foamcow]

An even "better" way came to light by accident.

I used Automator to create an "Extract PDF to plain text" app. (I ultimately wanted just wanted to copy/paste the text into something else).
This managed to easily circumvent the lock put on the PDF and gave me a bunch of useful text files via drag and drop.
It managed to do over 100 in about a 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.

 

[jpadie]

good to know. a bit talentless that the app does not honour pdf locks though...