How do I remove PDF padlocks?
Q For a small charity, I encourage suppliers to provide invoices as email attachments. These I wish now to ‘save’ to the cloud to reduce printed copy. One of my suppliers sends PDF invoices that I’m unable to save or print to file. These PDFS have a padlock symbol that appears outside the left margin of the document. To do anything other than produce a printed copy, I’m asked to enter a password. I’ve asked the supplier about this, forwarding one of his own emails back to him, replete with the original PDF attachment. Having taken a look he replied that he had never seen that symbol before and it’s not showing in his original document. Can you throw light on where the padlock might come from and how to get rid of it? Ben Sladen
A Yes. Simply, this is a ‘protected’ PDF. The particular protections will vary from PDF to PDF, but are specified and applied by the person or organisation that produced the original document. To do this, the originator must use Adobe Acrobat Pro – a paid-for version of the PDF software, typically used by larger businesses. Resulting PDFS are then displayed with a padlock icon, indicating that some features are protected.
So, that’s why you’re seeing a padlock. However, without the password there’s nothing you can do to remove it. If your supplier doesn’t know the password, then we can guess only that these protections are applied automatically by his organisation – which is pretty common – or at least by whatever computer system he has purchased to produce his invoices.
If it’s the former, then he’ll need to contact his organisation’s IT administrator to ask them to remove or relax the protections for PDF documents he creates for you. If it’s his own system, then he might need to contact his own supplier for specific advice. However, the basic procedure in Acrobat Pro for accessing the relevant options is to select the Tools tab followed by the Protect icon.
From your end, all you can see is what protections have been applied. That might at least help inform your supplier what needs unlocking at his end. To do this, first open the PDF in Reader. Now open the File menu and choose Properties (see screenshot above left), and then click the Security tab. The entries labelled as ‘Not Allowed’ in the Document Restrictions Summary section show what features have been locked by the PDF creator (see screenshot above).