- Can it open a PDF when I don't know the password?
- No, and that's deliberate. If the PDF has a user password — the one a reader demands before it will show you a single page — the file's contents are genuinely encrypted with a key derived from that password. Without it there is nothing to read, only ciphertext. This tool does not guess, run a dictionary, or brute-force, and no browser-based tool honestly can: even a short password takes an impractical amount of compute, and the ones that advertise 'password recovery' are either charging you to run a server farm against it or quietly doing nothing. If you've lost the password, the realistic move is to ask whoever sent you the file to send it again unlocked, or to re-download it from the account it came from. Banks, payroll systems and insurers almost always use a derivable password (a date of birth, the last digits of an account number) and will tell you the rule if you ask.
- Does my file get uploaded?
- No. There is no server in the path at all. The page loads, and from then on everything — reading the file, decrypting it, rendering the pages, writing the new PDF — happens in JavaScript on your own machine. You can check this two ways. Open your browser's network tab before you drop the file and watch nothing happen. Or, more convincingly, disconnect from the internet after the page has loaded and unlock the PDF anyway: it still works. The password is treated the same way. It's read from the input box, handed to the PDF reader running in your tab, and forgotten when you close it.
- What's the difference between the two kinds of PDF password?
- A PDF can carry two, and they do very different jobs. The user password (sometimes called the open password) is the one that stops the document opening at all — get it wrong and you see nothing. The owner password (or permissions password) leaves the document readable by anyone but sets flags saying you may not print it, copy text out of it, extract pages, or fill in its forms. That second kind is by far the more common annoyance, because the file opens fine and then refuses to do the one thing you needed. It's also security theatre: the restrictions are just flags in the file, and every reader is on the honour system to obey them. Most of the time you'll open a restricted PDF here, never see a password box, and get back a copy that prints and copies normally.
- Why isn't the unlocked PDF selectable or searchable anymore?
- Because of how the decryption has to work in a browser, and we'd rather say so up front than let you find out later. The library that can decrypt a PDF can render its pages; the library that can write a new PDF can't decrypt. So the path is: decrypt and render each page, then embed those rendered pages into a brand-new document that was never encrypted. The output is honest — no encryption dictionary, no permission flags, nothing to strip later — but the pages are images, so text selection, live links and form fields don't survive. That's why the .txt download sits next to the PDF. It's built from the real text layer of the decrypted document, so the copy-paste use case, which is usually the actual reason people want a PDF unlocked, comes back intact. If you only need the words, take the .txt and ignore the PDF.
- What encryption can it handle?
- All of what's in the wild. RC4 at 40 and 128 bits from the older PDF revisions, AES-128 from PDF 1.6, and AES-256 in both the original revision 5 form and the corrected revision 6 form that PDF 2.0 standardised. In practice that means anything produced in the last twenty-five years by Acrobat, Word, LibreOffice, a bank's statement generator or a scanner's built-in software. If a PDF opens in a normal reader with the password you have, it will open here.
- Is it legal to remove a password from a PDF?
- Use this on PDFs you're entitled to open. Removing the print restriction from your own bank statement, your own payslip, a contract you're a party to, or a document someone sent you to read is ordinary use of your own files, and in most places the restriction flags carry no legal weight of their own. Stripping protection from a document you have no right to is a different matter and a different question, and the law that applies depends on where you are and what the document is. This tool can't help you there anyway: without the password there's nothing to decrypt, and we don't guess.
- Why is the unlocked file a different size from the original?
- Usually bigger, sometimes much bigger, because the pages are now JPEG images rather than text and vector instructions. A ten-page text document that started at 200 KB can come back at two or three megabytes. The quality setting is the knob: 200 DPI is the default and looks right at full screen and in print, 150 DPI roughly halves the size, and 100 DPI is for long documents where you mainly need something readable. Scanned PDFs tend to go the other way and come out smaller, because the original scan was probably stored at a higher resolution than you need. If size is the problem rather than the lock, run the result through Compress PDF.
- My PDF is a scan and the text download didn't appear. Why?
- Because there's no text in it to hand over. A scanned document is a photograph of a page — to your computer it's pixels, not characters, so there's nothing for the extractor to find and an empty .txt would be worse than none. The PDF itself still unlocks normally. To get words out of a scan you need optical character recognition, which reads the shapes and guesses the letters; OCR PDF does that, and it runs in the browser too.
- How big a PDF can it take?
- 100 MB and 200 pages. Those aren't billing limits, and there's no way to pay to raise them — they're the point where rendering every page in a browser tab stops being pleasant and starts being a frozen window. If you hit either one, split the document first and unlock the parts; the page will point you at PDF Splitter when it happens. There's no cap on how many PDFs you unlock in a session. Unlock one, unlock forty, come back tomorrow and do it again.
