What you are looking at
A permission-flagged document. Beside the encryption dictionary there’s an integer whose bits say whether printing, copying, editing, annotating and page assembly are allowed. Switch the relevant bits off and a cooperative reader refuses those actions.
The giveaway is that nobody asked you for a password. The user password is empty, which is why the file opens for anyone, including this tool. It reports the scheme, the key length and the flag bits before you touch anything.
The flags are instructions a reader chooses to obey
The pages themselves are stored in the clear. What stops you printing is that the reader read a flag and chose not to offer the button. A reader that ignores the flags displays and prints everything, which makes permissions closer to a signed request than to a lock.
That cuts both ways. If you restricted a document expecting it to be safe, the text is still perfectly readable to anyone who looks with the right tool.
The workarounds, and what each one costs
- Screenshot the pages. Fine for one page you need to read. You lose the text layer, the search, and anything spanning a page break.
- Print to a virtual PDF driver that ignores the flags. Often blocked by the same flag that blocked printing to begin with.
- Rewrite the file with the restrictions cleared. That’s what this tool does, and it keeps the text layer, the fonts and the layout exactly as they were.
What comes out the other side
An ordinary PDF: no encryption, no flags, nothing that asks.
- Encryption
- Removed, although it was never encrypting against you in the first place
- Permission flags
- Cleared: print, copy, edit, assemble
- Text layer
- Unchanged
- Layout and fonts
- Unchanged
- Metadata
- A separate job, covered by the metadata cleaner
Keep the original if the file came from someone else
An unrestricted copy is a different document from the one you were sent. If the file is a contract or a policy, or anything that gets audited, keep both. And if the restriction looked deliberate, think about whether you were meant to be able to lift it. The software won’t decide that for you.