Unlock a PDF

Yes. It decrypts with the password you supply — nothing here guesses, brute-forces or exploits anything. A tool that removed passwords without them would be a cracking tool, and this page is not one.

Because you locked it and the prompt is now in the way: a bank statement you cannot merge, a form you cannot fill, a document your own scanner passworded. Removing the password produces a normal PDF that any tool can read.

Pages, text and images come over intact — the content streams are copied, not re-rendered, so text stays selectable and images keep their compression. What a rebuild cannot carry is document-level extras: outlines and bookmarks, form fields, annotations and comments, and the metadata. That is the honest trade, and the page says it rather than claiming a perfect copy.

Because it does not work, and this was measured rather than assumed: the library keeps the original cross-reference stream, whose dictionary still points at the encryption entry, so the “plain” copy still refuses to open without the password. Rebuilding the pages is the only route that produces a file with no encryption entry at all, and the result is re-loaded without a password to prove it.

The library refuses to open it, the page says the password is wrong, and no file is produced. Nothing partial is written, which is the only honest outcome for a wrong password.