My girlfriend recently sent me a PDF that she needed to print. She had tried to strip off the printing restrictions using the site I made for that purpose but it hadn’t worked. I quickly realised that my site, which is really a web front end on Ghostscript would not be able to deal with that particular PDF because it was encrypted.
Interestingly, it seems that the Ghostscript project has been making steady progress since I first made that site and can now remove encryption as well as the usual usability frustrations my girlfriend was dealing with; printing and copy/paste restrictions. After a bit of an update it is now cheerfully removing encryption too!
So in the spirit of “do things, tell people”, here is where to go next time you have a difference of opinion with a PDF file: http://pdf-permissions-remover.com/
If you are interested in the code you can find it on Github: https://github.com/sleepycat/pdfstripper
mike.williamson 