Security & Permissions Tools
Access control on a PDF is genuinely useful and genuinely easy to get wrong, and the first thing worth being straight about is what a browser can do. These tools open a document you have permission to unlock, take the text out of a page so it cannot be copied, make a finished file permanent, and report the protection a file already carries. None of them sets a password: PDF encryption is not available here, and a tool that claimed it would be writing a flag, not a lock.
- Unlock a document you have permission to open, and inspect the permissions already inside it
- Remove the text layer so nothing in the file can be selected, copied or searched
- Flatten forms, comments and markup into the page, and strip embedded files and scripts
All Security & Permissions Tools (8)
Security & Permissions FAQ
Can these tools password-protect a PDF?
No, and the tool pages say so instead of implying otherwise. PDF encryption needs a cipher, a key-derivation function and a permission bitmask; the library this site runs on has no encryption API, and writing one by hand is not something a browser tool should attempt. What the tools do instead is remove the information: flatten the file so nothing can be edited, or rasterise the pages so there is no text left to copy.
I am locked out of a document. Can you remove the password?
Removing a password you cannot get past is not something these tools do, and it would not be safe if they did. If the password is genuinely yours and you have lost it, the practical route is to recover the original from a backup or ask the sender to resend it.
Does removing the text stop someone making a copy?
It stops copying from the file, which is the part a PDF tool can control. It does not stop a photograph of the screen or OCR run over a printout, and it makes the page unreadable to a screen reader - the real trade-off. Lock only the pages that carry the sensitive parts.