Tag Archives: unsecure

Drawing Management, Legal, Office Tricks

DOTSOFT tools – Importing Linework from a PDF

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Every now and then we find ourselves in a pinch for data. I don’t know how many times I have had nothing but a PDF to go on..

Well, it appears that a PDF is lot more useful than I first thought. Particular If it’s a vector PDF, you can usually tell if it is by zooming in and out on the PDF and you will see all the linework generate separately.

I won’t lie, I haven’t found a free tool to do this yet. But over at DOTSOFT Tools an application called PDF2DWG http://www.dotsoft.com/pdf2dwg.htm for 95 US sheets does get the job done very nicely.

I’ve actually bought the entire toolpac package that comes with PDF2DWG ($245), good value if you ask me. You can find the tool in the ribbon after installing, along with a host of other useful ones.

Select a PDF, even a multipage one

Lots of options here as well. Detect line weights, removing little raster images (particularly use for PDFS generated by GIS programs) and even the ability to convert image-based pdfs to linework (can’t verify how well this works though)

Hit process and voila! Massive time saver, that can pull you out of a “not enough data” situation very quickly.

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Office Tricks, Uncategorized

How to unsecure a PDF the easy way

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Ever had to deal with this crap….

Say no more.. follow instruction below

METHOD 1 – QPDF with Gui (PDF Freedom)

Download the QPDF gui version here. Thanks to “J.P. Kloosterman” for making it up

https://www.mget.nl/static/files/PDF%20Freedom%20setup.exe

Open select input/ select output done.

 

METHOD 2 – Batch processing (QPDF command line tool)

1. Download the zip file from the link : Browse Files at SourceForge.net or direct download frm http://sourceforge.net/projects/qpdf/files/latest/download?source=files

2. Extract the archive to some location e.g. Desktop

3. Add your pdf to the “bin” folder of the extracted archive/folder structure.

4. Open command prompt. Easiest way is to right click on the bin folder while holding shift. There will be an option in the context menu “Opencommand window here”.

5. Type the following in the command window (black screen): qpdf -decrypt “Secured.pdf” “Unsecured.pdf” where “Secured.pdf” is the name of your file that you want to unsecure. Note the quotes are required. “Unsecured.pdf” is the name of the output file. Call it what you want.

Write this as a bat file in notepad and you can do hundreds of PDFS

Note:  For both of these methods If the PDF requires a password to OPEN the file this will not work. All other typical security is removed e.g. making changes, copying content etc

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