I’ll introduce how to remove passwords from password-protected PDFs using the QPDF command.

Prerequisites: Installing qpdf

Installing qpdf - macOS

brew install qpdf

Removing PDF File Restrictions

For PDF files that don’t have password protection but have print restrictions, you can remove them with the following command:

qpdf --decrypt input.pdf output.pdf

Removing PDF File Password

To remove the password from a password-protected PDF file input.pdf and output to output.pdf:

qpdf --decrypt --password=PDF_PASSWORD input.pdf output.pdf

That’s all from the Gemba, where I wanted to remove passwords from password-protected PDF files.