Scenario: The goal is to send encrypted PDFs via email
1) I print a PDF using PDFCreator to encrypt it with a password
2) I send this encrypted PDF to our client
3) They print the PDF to their printer
Works great, But if they want to keep the PDF without the password, how do they decrypt it? The client is likewise sending us encrypted PDFs (made using PDFCreator), but we don't want to store them in our document management software with the password on it.
Solution I thought should work, but didn't: Print the encrypted PDF to PDFCreator. Since I can print to a printer, I assumed I could to PDFCreator. However, I get a blank document with the below error on page 2:
ERROR: undefined
OFFENDING COMMAND: eexec
STACK:
/quit
-dictionary-
-mark
Our current workaround is to print the encrypted PDF to paper, then scan it back in as an unecrypted PDF. Needless to say, this is a horrible long term solution, especially since we deal wtih hundreds of PDFs back and forth to our client each month.
I really hate to mention a competing application, since I love PDF Creator and believe it to be the best out there, but there is a free program that allows you to add or remove the password from an existing PDF (in addition to the usual printing to PDF functions). You could use it for the purpose of opening your encrypted files to remove the security. The encryption functions are the only things I use this other app for. The name is pdf24. I'll let you Google it. Perhaps such a feature will hopefully one day be added to PDF Creator.
EDIT: Sorry, I had to edit my response. With pdf24 Creator, you can't seem to open an encrypted pdf to remove the encryption, which is odd. There's no prompt to enter the initial password. It's still useful for putting passwords on existing documents, which is what I use it for (open the document in edit mode, right click the window title, select properties, then the security tab). There are, of course, other utilities for removing the password, but I haven't found a free one. "A-PDF Password Security" comes to mind, if you want something you need to pay for. It's not very expensive and will do what you initially wanted it for.
I Ran into the same problem, and found the following workaround: if PDF security does not allow to generate unsecured PDFs (which seems logic), let's generate another format..
- Create a new PDFCreator printer with another profile, which generates JPG images
- For secured files, use the JPG printer instead of regular PDF printer
- Re-print the resulting JPG with regular PDF printer.
Because of the JPG format, this works only for 1-page documents. Better than nothing !
usually printing encrypted PDFs to PDFCreator should work, but sometimes for unknown reasons ghostscript will cause some problems. Have you tried with several different PDFs and they all don´t work?