My accountants sensibly send me PDFs of returns and authorization forms with password protection enabled. Sadly, this makes it difficult for me to add text and sign the document digitally, at least with my preferred PDF editor on Linux, Master PDF Editor. Every year I fail to remember how to work around this problem, so I’m writing this article, hoping that my web search will find it next year.

The Symptom

My PDF document is password protected, so I can’t do anything with it, including adding text and signing it digitally.

The Problem

Web searches for this topic return many many many irrelevant articles. It’s worse than searching the web for recipes.

The Solution

Use evince to print a new copy of the PDF document to file. This removes the passwodrd protection by default.