Print unavailable in acrobat file - any workaround?

I'm afraid you cannot change it. (You cannot easy unlock printing directly in PDF file.)

But... somebody told me, that there is a way to get rid of it.

First, you need to install a postscript interpreter (i.e. gostscript and gostcsript viewer - freeware).
Ghostcript viewer allows you to view and print PDF files.

Then, you may also need some special PS files to print locked PDF's, but don't ask me how to get them. I suppose it's not legal. ;-)

HTH

Is the "Select Text/Graphics" tool disabled too ? If not, grab the content and paste it to another application.

Is the "Select Text/Graphics" tool disabled too ? If not, grab the content and paste it to another application."

Yes it is disabled.

The passwords are encrypted with some RSA thing...pretty tough to crack (nothing you can do in a text editor, for example.). You can't open secured PDFs in Illustrator or Photoshop, can't import them into InDesign...we've tried. <g>

If all you want is a printout, you can always make a screen shot of it...view at 100% and press Print Screen (or use any of the modifier keys to just print the active window etc.). Course that might not work if the page is larger than your monitor.

Otherwise, if it's that critical, try these guys...
http://www.pwcrack.com/pdf.htm

hg

P.S. If you have/can get access to Acrobat (the full program), you can do a Save As and take a crack at guessing the password...that's where Security is set, in the Save As dialog.

hg

luby,

what's the status of your Print from locked PDF situation...were you able to try out any of the suggestions?

I'm curious too about if that link to www.pwcrack.com worked for you...

hg

Well the site that cracks passwords seems like the solution for someone who needs a document unlocked badly enough, but I am not about to spend any cash on this endeavor.
The other suggestions of "print screen" and guessing the password using the Acrobat program are just silly, and besides the document is over 100 pages in lenght.
What I was really after was a "real" crack for pdf documents. If there is nothing like that anywhere available, then I will accept that.

Ah...how much $$ did the service want? I'm curious.

FWIW I've been a subscriber to four different PDF listservs for a number of years and have never seen a solution to this problem (other than what I suggested), though the question does come up periodically. Basically you need hacker-level knowledge regarding RSA encryption to unlock them...seems ridiculous...except of course it answers certain users' needs to completely secure a PDF doc.

I don't know what's more critical to you, to have full access to the contents (ability to print e.g.) or to maintain the look and feel of the PDFs, but one thing you may want to give a shot is the free Acrobat Access plug-in. It can convert a PDF to HTML or Text files. It's mainly meant for visually disabled people being able to use a text reader program to read aloud the contents of a PDF doc.

I've never tried it myself but I assume it's going to have to change the PDF layout/design in order to work. Nor do I know if it can work with password-protected PDFs, the Adobe pages don't mention them either way. But it's free, so why not try it:

http://access.adobe.com/access_plugin.html 
(windows only)

hg

Just tried it. The option to export to HTML is greyed out! I did try it with another pdf file though, and it does work, but you will lose a lot of the original formatting. For example, the images are gone, and the formatting of tables is totally botched up.
Nice try though.

sheesh! That sucker's locked down tight.

Well your question was "is there any way around this"? and I guess the answer is no, unless you want to pay the pwcracker service.

Sorry...
:-(

wait...did you try the ghostscript viewer solution suggested earlier?

hg

hey krzycz, I don't think you did anything awful, the link to the patch is right there in the console window.

but can you tell me how you'd apply the patch (that one, and others?). I can't figure it out. Is it just that simple...replace the old one with the new .ps file? Or do I have to muck around with command lines...

Can't find any answers to "how to apply a patch" in GS faqs/newsgroups.

hg

Wait a minute...krzycz, your solution doesn't work.

The patch is only to allow ghostscript to be able to access secured PDFs *for which you know the password* (you have to enter it on a command line in the console). If you don't know the password, you're out of luck.

Here's what they say (from http://www.ozemail.com.au/~geoffk/pdfencrypt/):

____________________________
GhostScript versions 4.02 and later

For these versions, things became somewhat simpler. All you need to do is replace the file called pdf_sec.ps with the version provided below, as described in the documentation.
pdf_sec.ps
This file is version 1.0.4, which corrected a small bug involving user passwords. Version 1.0.3 corrected a bug visible with the US Copyright Office's Form TX. Version 1.0.2 added support for versions 5.0 and later of GhostScript. Version 1.0.1 corrected support for interpreters with 64-bit integers.

Usage information

If GhostScript reports ****This file has a user password set., you can specify a password by setting PDFPassword to either the user or owner password of the PDF file. On the command line, you might say gs -sPDFPassword=apassword somefile.pdf. Inside GhostScript, you can say /PDFPassword (apassword) def. You can also put this in a file generated with pdf2dsc; put it just after the line that says %%BeginProlog.
I don't know how to do this with GSView, because I don't have any hardware available that can run it. If someone knows how, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

Lost Passwords

Of course, to do this you must know the user or owner password of the file. If you got the file from someone else, you will want to ask them for the password. If it was your file and you've forgotten what password you chose, you should take whatever documents you generated the PDF file from, and re-generate it.
Alternatively, you might try contacting PWCrack, who can help you unprotect the file.
_____________________________


And...PWCrack is that web site I referred to earlier.


hg

Hmmm, I don't know.

I've got a PDF file with locked printing feature. Using Acrobat Reader I cannot print it, nor copy/paste, nothing.

I open it in GS Viewer (patched) and... I can print this file, extract text, etc.

Maybe sometimes the files are locked (printing only), but not encrypted?

Well, I have to try with another locked PDFs.

Regards

oh yeah? that's interesting...there are 2 levels of password protection avail. for PDF files, one to access it, one to change security settings. Maybe yours just had one?

Well Luby should give it a shot and let's see...

hg

Luby, it would be a pity I you let this thread to be autodeleted. Please either award it to the person who helped you most (not me) or contact Community Support for a refund and transfer to PAQ. Hope you understand.

I agree, please do something luby....

Sorry to keep you hangin' people. For some reason I haven't received any notice from EE about new posts to the thread,until today. (Nov 4) and so with other things to tend to, I simply forgot about it....8^(
I will try the latest suggestions and let you all know the out come .
Regards,
Luby

Whoo hoo! I have it!
The combination of Aladdin's Ghostscript version 6.01and Ghostscript viewer version 3.4 was all that was required. I had difficulty with earlier versions and could not even find the pdf_sec.ps file after installing. A little confusion resulted at first when I never realized that Ghostscript was a requied install before the Ghostscript viewer. Nevertheless, no hack was needed.
Full points and thanx for all the efforts of everyone involved. Hopefully this will benefit everyone.

Luby

Oops! I have to add that it only worked with one file that I didn't have to replace the pdf_sec.ps file, but after trying another, I couldn't even open it, so after replacing that file all was fine!