This morning I happened across a folder on my NAS. It contained a bunch of stuff I’d backed up from a long-dead and very forgotten about laptop. In the folder were a few dozen password protected pdfs but (for reasons long forgotten about) I’d protected the pdfs so that I couldn’t edit or export them or copy the text from them, but I could read them. Being a contrary sort, I wanted more than the ability to just read them, especially as some of them looked like half-decent unfinished writing projects, and I can’t read old-style .pdfs on my phone (because of formatting reasons of age – they were created two and a half decades ago). Besides which, what I really wanted to do was to crack them open, back them into Word, and play with them. Naturally, my string of C21st passwords all failed to open the .pdfs and if you think I can remember passwords from last century you’ve got another thing coming. So what I wanted was a way of opening in Edit a bunch of password protected .pdfs and exporting them into Word (neither of which I was able to do because of the password issue). But after a bit of thought and mucking about and a hot chocolate and a home-made cinnamon swirl or two, I came up with an idea. Which I executed. And it worked! I now have a bunch of very promising writing projects in Word. No passwords needed, even though they were password protected. I’m feeling a bit smug. Here’s how to do it:
- Open the .pdf(s) in any kind of application capable of printing (I used Chrome)
- Select Print to .PDF
- Print as a new file
- Open the new file in Acrobat (or some other .pdf editor)
- Convert to text and save the text file as a new document
- Open the new text file in Word and Save As whatever the current version of Word is.
I could have shortcut 5. and 6. to save 4. as a Word document, but that brought in a bunch of garbage such as endash which is a character I loathe.