Disclaimer: The following can be considered illegal, so make sure you understand any legal implication before trying.

I bought a PDF book, which was secured. Meaning it could not be printed or annotated. Not being able to annotate was very irritating, because I like to highlight important parts and make notes in my PDF’s. There are different ways to remove security from PDF’s. I wanted a quick way.

One of the quickest ways is to use an unlocking service on the internet. There are paid services, e.g. pdfunlock.com, or free services, e.g. smallpdf.com. I had used the paid service in the past, so I decided to give the free service from smallpdf.com a try. I was really impressed by it and can highly recommend them. All I had to do was drag and drop the PDF to their webpage and download the unlocked PDF. Very smooth.

In addition to unlocking service they provide other services like:

• compress PDF
• JPG to PDF
• PDF to JPG
• Merge PDF
• Split PDF
• Word to PDF
• Excel to PDF
• PowerPoint to PDF

Their terms of service are also pretty interesting. Very easy to read and understand. But just in case you find it to complicated they have an abbreviated version along side each term. Nice. An example to others!

Give it a try and let me know what you think.