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MAC Preview has automatically added password to 3 x pdf's

I've been using MAC Preview to update/edit several pdf's.. and of course whilst working on them automatically save them using Command S. Now for some reason, all the documents have passwords on them to open the documents, and I have absolutely not password protected them at all (yes am adamant).


Any ideas? I need to open the documents and have no idea why there is now a password protection on them that I have not created.


Thanks.



MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 12.6

Posted on Oct 19, 2022 1:27 AM

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4 replies

Oct 19, 2022 6:17 AM in response to britchick1002

I have noticed others posting this same complaint about Preview locking PDFs, yet cannot reproduce any password-locked PDF simply by annotation and then saving it. Not on any version of Monterey through v12.6 nor Big Sur through 11.7 — Intel or Apple Silicon. Where are these PDFs being saved too?


I have opened, annotated, and manually saved PDFs to my local drive that were originally created with the following:

  1. MacTex's XeTex
  2. Groff output via Apple's pstopdf(1) utility
  3. LibreOffice Writer 7.4.2 as PDF/A-3B/UA-1
  4. Apple's PDFContext from Pages v12.1
  5. By opening and exporting an existing PDF from Affinity Designer 1.10.5 as a PDF/X-3 document.
  6. PDF created by InDesign 17.1 (Windows) using Adobe PDF Library 16.0.5


None of this variety of PDFs exhibited any locks on the PDF after a manual save from Preview.

Oct 19, 2022 3:01 AM in response to britchick1002

You mean all of a sudden, the pdf is password protected, as in when you double-click to open it shows this:



I have no idea how this would happen from pressing Command-S to save a document.

Very troubling, indeed.


The only thing I can think of right now is to use Time Machine to recover an earlier version of the file before it became password protected.



MAC Preview has automatically added password to 3 x pdf's

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