After you launched Recover PDF Password, you will see its main window:
- Select protected PDF file by clicking
button and locating the file. - Now, choose the recovery method:By password length – this is one of the most important options affecting checking time. Usually, you can test all short passwords in just a few minutes; but for longer passwords, you have to be patient and/or have some knowledge about the password (including the character set which has been used, or even better – the template).The minimum length cannot be set bigger than the maximum length, of course. If the minimum and maximum lengths are not the same, the program tries shorter passwords first.
By template – if you already know some symbols or characters in the password, you can specify the template to decrease the total number of passwords to be verified. For example, you know that the password contains 8 characters, starts with “x”, and ends with “99”. So, the template to be set is “x?????99”.
Symbol – the symbol, used in template to substitute other symbols of search. For example, “?” is the symbol in “123??avc” template. Then only these symbols will be changed during password search, all other symbols will be left unchanged.
Exhaustive search – if the PDF file has both User and Owner passwords, and they are long and complex, you should try this feature. This option is recommended if your file uses 128-bit encryption. Recover PDF Password tries all possible encryption keys until finds the right one, and allows decrypting the file using that key – the resulting PDF file will have no security at all. That method gives 100% success but may take maximum time.
- Both Owner and User passwords can be searched for.
- Select various charset options:
Include lowercase Latin letters – all small Latin: abcdefghjiklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Include uppercase Latin letters – all Latin caps will be used: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Include special symbols – all special symbols (!@…): `~!@#$%^&*()-_=+\|,./<>?;:'”[]{}
Include digits – (0-9): 012345679
Include space – enables “space” character
User-defined symbols – enter symbols that are most likely to have been used in the password - When all the options are selected, all you have to do is click “Start recovery” button and wait.
During the decryption procedure you’ll be able to see overall decryption progress, elapsed and estimated time, etc.
Note that you can pause the recovering process at any time by clicking the corresponding button and continue it later. - Now you can decrypt a file – save it without passwords and usage limitations. Refer to this section for details.
- All the passwords are saved to History tab for your convenience.
NOTE
1. When encoding a PDF file, information about localization, in which a password has been entered, is lost. For example, these two passwords are absolutely the same:
Win1251:[ Ійизащ ] == Latin1:[ ²éèçàù ]
2. Also note that Acrobat Reader Pro transforms passwords differently on Windows and Mac OS. For example, one can enter password “²àç” on Windows OS and Recover PDF Password will decrypt it on Mac OS. But when entering this password on Mac OS, it will be transformed into “2a`c”, thus changing not only the encrypting, but also the password length. Therefore, Adobe Reader won’t accept such a password.
If one enters password “²àç” on Mac OS, it will be transformed into “2a`c “. Adobe Reader on Mac OS will accept both of these passwords, while on Windows OS it will accept only “2a`c”. Recover PDF Password will decrypt this password as “2a`c”. Thus, even if a right password has been entered, you may not be able to open a PDF doc.
3. In an encrypted document a password hash, not a password itself, is stored. Thus more than one password may correspond to one and the same hash. Recover PDF Password searches for a password by trial-and-error method, trying all possible encryption keys until finds the right one. So a decrypted password may possibly not match the original one, but Acrobat Reader will accept it.