How to copy text from a protected PDF

Two protections, one word

Almost everyone who cannot copy from a PDF has been told the file is "password protected", and that phrase covers two situations that could hardly be more different.

• A user password. The file will not open at all without it, and the bytes of every page really are encrypted. Nothing can read them until somebody types the password. No tool and no trick changes that.
• An owner password. The file opens for anybody. Alongside the content sits a short list of things the author would prefer you did not do (copy, print, edit), and readers are expected to honour it.

If your PDF opened and you are reading it right now, you have the second kind. That matters, because the second kind is not a lock. It is a note attached to the document asking software to behave, and the text it is protecting is stored exactly as it is in any other PDF.

A quick way to tell them apart: if you were able to read the document before you tried to copy from it, nothing about it is encrypted against you.

Why a reader obeys a request it could ignore

Because the specification says to, and because the readers people use are made by companies that would rather follow the document's stated wishes than argue with them. It is the same reason a browser respects a robots file it is under no technical compulsion to read.

The consequence is worth understanding before you spend an afternoon on it: the restriction is enforced by the program showing you the page, not by the file. Change the program and the restriction is simply not there. That is not a loophole somebody forgot to close. It is what this kind of protection has always been, and the PDF specification has never claimed otherwise.

It also explains the thing that annoys people most. The same document can be uncopyable in one reader and perfectly copyable in another, with no difference in the file at all.

Getting the text out

There are two routes, and which one you want depends on whether you need the words or the file.

1. Check which kind of protection you have. Try opening the PDF. If it opens and you can read it, the protection is a restriction and nothing is encrypted in a way that stops you. If it demands a password before showing you a single page, that is a different problem and the rest of this will not help.
2. If you only need the words, take them straight out. Go to pdfsansar.com/pdf-to-text and drop the file in. It reads a restricted PDF exactly as it reads any other, because the restriction was never applied to the text. Copy what comes back, or download it as a .txt file.
3. If you need the file to stop blocking things, lift the restriction. Go to pdfsansar.com/unlock-pdf and drop the file in. It will tell you the PDF opens without a password and name what it is blocking, then offer one button. There is no password to enter.
4. Download and check. Open the copy you get back and try selecting a line of text. Printing and editing come back at the same time, because all three were stored in the same place.

Both run entirely in your browser. A document somebody marked confidential enough to restrict is exactly the kind you should not be uploading to a stranger's server to get around the restriction, which is what most results for this question ask you to do.

When nothing comes back

If the text tool returns an empty box, the restriction was never your problem: your PDF is a scan. A scan is a photograph of a page, so the file holds pixels and not characters, and there is nothing to copy whether it is restricted or not. You can tell because you cannot select anything in the original either, restriction or no restriction.

Reading those needs OCR, which recognises letter shapes in an image, and no amount of unlocking substitutes for it. OCR PDF does that here, in your browser like everything else: run the scan through it, then the text tool has something to find.

Whether you should

That is a judgement about the document, not about the software, and it is yours to make. Lifting a restriction on a statement your own bank sent you, so you can paste a figure into a spreadsheet, is an ordinary thing to do. Stripping the protection from someone else's work in order to republish it is not, and the fact that it is easy has no bearing on whether it is yours to do.

We cannot help either way, because the file never reaches us. Every tool here runs on your own device, which means we could not inspect what you are unlocking even if we wanted to.

After the restriction is off

You get a second copy; the original on your disk is untouched. The new file carries no encryption at all, so printing and editing work as well as copying, and tools that refuse encrypted input will accept it.

If what you actually wanted was to stop other people copying from a document of yours, that is Protect PDF, and it is worth reading this page again first: a restriction is a request, and anybody who wants the text will get it. If information genuinely must not leave a document, take it out with Redact PDF before you send it.