Fun With PDFs
Thanks to my trusty Fedora box, I was able to please one of the Big Cheeses here at work. I had a PDF that needed to be converted to a Word document. The first thing I tried to do was open it in Acrobat Pro and run a quick Save As. On a normal PDF this would have been the fastest way to get the job done. Of course this PDF was restricted with password security (Save As failed due to those restrictions). How annoying! I remembered using a command line tool a few months ago to convert a PDF to some other file type and figured I’d give it a shot. I installed the “xpdf-utils” package from Fedora’s core repo and ran the file through pdf2ps (Ubuntu installs the pdf tools by default). I then copied it back to the machine running Acrobat Pro, opened the postscript file and saved it as a Word doc. Task completed and lessons learned. The lessons?? Linux has a tool for that, and just because something is supposed to be secure (like a PDF that isn’t supposed to be changed) doesn’t mean it is.
To satisfy my own curiosity, I took a few minutes to create a PDF that required a password to open. I attempted to run it through the pdf2ps tool and I was unable to convert the file without providing the password. I should note that Acrobat Pro issued a warning when I saved the pdf stating that Adobe products enforce the restrictions set by password security but some third party products might be able to bypass some of the restrictions.
Note: This PDF did belong to the University, since it was ours I don’t feel that it was immoral to circumvent the restrictions.
Recent Comments