A document you own that will not let you print it. A statement you cannot copy a figure out of. A form your screen reader cannot read aloud. Upload the file above and those restrictions are removed, leaving a normal PDF you can use.
Two things are worth being clear about before you start: which kind of protection this actually handles, and when you are entitled to remove it.
PDF supports two separate passwords, and only one of them is something a tool can remove for you.
A permissions password — also called an owner password — leaves the file readable by anyone but marks it as restricted: no printing, no copying text, no editing, sometimes no extraction for accessibility. The important detail is that these restrictions are advisory. They are flags in the file asking software to behave, and the content itself is not encrypted. This is what the tool above clears.
An open password encrypts the file's contents. Without it the document cannot be read by anything at all — the bytes are genuinely scrambled. No tool can process such a file, and none should claim to. If your PDF asks for a password before it will even display, you need that password. Open it in a PDF reader, enter it, remove the protection under the document's security settings, and save a copy.
So: if the file opens but blocks you from doing something with it, this tool applies. If it will not open at all, it does not.
Use this on documents you own or have the right to modify. That covers most real situations:
What this is not for: circumventing protection on material you do not have rights to, or on documents belonging to someone else. Removing restrictions does not grant any right to copy, republish or distribute the contents, and copyright applies exactly as it did before.
This deserves its own section, because it is the situation where restrictions do the most harm and where removing them matters most.
One of the permission flags controls content extraction — whether software may pull text out of the document. Screen readers work by extracting text and speaking it. When that flag is set, a blind or partially sighted reader is handed a document that their software refuses to read aloud, even though it opens perfectly well and the text is right there.
The same flag blocks text-to-speech tools, braille displays, and translation software. It is very often set by accident — a default in whatever produced the file, rather than a deliberate choice by anyone.
Accessibility law in many jurisdictions requires public bodies and educational institutions to provide documents in usable form, and PDF's own specification has long carried an exception permitting extraction for accessibility purposes. If a locked document is preventing someone from reading it, clearing that flag is the right thing to do.
Worth understanding, because it changes how much weight you should give them — in both directions.
Permission flags are stored in the file and honoured voluntarily. Adobe Reader respects them. So do most well-behaved applications. Software that chooses not to simply reads the content anyway, because the content was never encrypted — there is no key involved, only a request.
This has two implications. If you have been treating permission restrictions as security on documents you send out, they are not: use an open password instead, which genuinely encrypts. And if a restricted document has been frustrating you, it was only ever a request that your software was politely honouring.
The result is an ordinary PDF with no restrictions, so every other tool will now work on it — converting to Word, merging, compressing, splitting. Encrypted or restricted files cannot be processed by anything, which is why unlocking is usually the first step rather than the last.
If the document is confidential and you are only removing restrictions in order to work with it, remember to protect it again before sending it on. And keep the original locked version, in case you need to prove what you received.
Protect PDF adds a password back, PDF to Word makes an unlocked document editable, OCR PDF makes a scan searchable, and Redact PDF removes confidential content properly. Browse all PDF tools.