Removing a PDF Password in Monterey

I don't know, I only access documents intended for me.

1

I just tried that method on my already open credit card statement.

It didn't work, so I must not be the owner of the document.

Luis Sequeira1 wrote:

None of us knows what Apple may be doing.

I fear that it's worse than that.

I fear that no one at Apple knows what Apple may be doing.

dhlala wrote:

Thanks for all your insight ... but the thing is ... I have e-mails from before Monterey, mostly all from the same set of senders, which worked perfectly with a simple "Export as PDF" option in the file menu. I tried those same PDFs out of my Mail Archive, and "Export as PDF" is greyed out on those same files in Monterey. So the documents are still being created exactly as they were before. It is the way Preview in Monterey works with them that has changed, and not the documents. Hopefully Apple will treat this as a bug and fix it, and soon.

I am not disputing that.

It seems clear that there was a change, and Monterey forbids "Export to PDF" for password protected ones. We don't know if it was intentional, or not (though I am inclined to think that it was).

I am just saying that there are different levels of protection in a pdf, and some prevent printing (even to PDF), others do not.

SIGGYUSAF wrote:

This option no longer works either. The only option available using this method is to save as post script. This likewise used to be my preferred option prior to MacOS Big Sur.

As I said before, it all depends on how the password protected PDF was created. If it was created with protection against printing, it will not print to PDF. It appears that this is the case. If it requires only a password for opening, it does print to PDF, and the resulting file is not password protected.

I used new version of Firefox to remove password. Just drag-and-drop pdf to Firefox window, it will ask password, type password, clik print, and there you can print to pdf (select pdf instead of printer).

It is shame Apple removed this from Monterey. I miss Export as Pdf, now it is greyed out. Not happy.

Hi. Glad it helped, there are a few posts on here now that have the same solution. It took a while to get to that solution and may people are still posting partial solutions that only work for certain scenarios such as when you are the one that set the original owners pwd.

As Luis suggested, printing to PDF works.