saulrosenbaum.com / Unprotected PDFs

So aggravating, I had a fellow illustrator do some artwork for a project, and he sent it over as a password-protected PDF, and of course, neglected to provide me the password, to further piss me off, he wasn’t reachable by either email or phone from 9am to 7pm - so in a deadline induced frenzy - I had to somehow get around the password, it was actually really easy.

My Unsuccessful Attempts:

1. Open in Illustrator / nope, no joy.
2. Open in Preview and saving an eps - opening eps in Illustrator / nope, no joy.
3. Open in Safari — Printing to postscript / open postscript in Illustrator / nope, and it took forever.
4. Open in Photoshop / nope, same results at my Illustrator attempt.
5. Open Acrobat and try to import protected pdf into new pdf / nope, no joy

How I removed the password from a pdf — I had a little freeware jem in my bag o’ tricks, it’s “Combine Pdfs” from MonkeyBread Software, and aside from it’s intended use (combining multiple jpegs & multiple pdfs into a single pdf) it also has the handy little side-effect of totally ignoring password protection. So I combined my problem pdf into a new file - tossed that file in Illustrator and declared my dominance over all documents portable.

Note: Although this did work for me, it may not work for you, use your best judgement, and don’t blame me if you run into issues.