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Open-Source PDF Software Capable of Decrypting PDFs

Decrypt, remove password protection, or open password-protected PDFs

26 tools

Command Line

PDFtk Server

Cli

Command-line tool to merge, split, and rotate PDFs; fill forms with FDF/XFDF data and flatten them (or generate an FDF stencil); encrypt/decrypt with passwords; add watermarks/stamps; manage bookmarks, metadata, and attachments; repair damaged PDFs; and recompress page streams.

C#

PdfPig

Library

Reads and extracts text, words, letters (with position/font data), images, annotations, hyperlinks, embedded files, and bookmarks from PDFs (port of PDFBox); performs layout/reading-order analysis; supports basic PDF creation, merging, read-only AcroForm inspection, and opening password-protected documents.

C++

qpdf

Library

Low-level, content-preserving PDF structure tool: linearizes ('fast web view'), encrypts/decrypts, splits and merges files, inspects/edits PDF object structure, and repairs damaged files. Explicitly does not render pages or extract text/content.

Go

pdf

Library

Go package (rsc.io/pdf) for reading PDF files: opens (optionally password-encrypted) files, reads the page tree, outline/bookmarks, per-page fonts and their metrics, and low-level page content (text runs and drawn rectangles) via a low-level Value/object API. A known unpatched stack-overflow DoS vulnerability is reported against it (GO-2026-5781).

DepreciatedStale
Go

UniPDF

Library

Go PDF library (pure Go): generates reports/invoices with styled text and tables; creates and fills forms; merges, splits, reorders, and rotates pages (incl. N-up layouts); extracts text (with position/formatting), images, and tabular data to CSV; adds/converts images to PDF; removes or adds password protection; validates and applies digital signatures; compresses/optimizes files; adds watermarks; and supports CCITTFax/JBIG2 image decoding.

Go

pdfcpu

CliLibrary

Go PDF processor (CLI + library) supporting PDF up to 2.0 (ISO 32000-2): validate, optimize, split, trim, and merge PDFs; encrypt/decrypt; resize, rotate, and crop pages; extract/manipulate images, fonts, and metadata; manage attachments and portfolios; validate, report, and remove digital signatures; add/remove stamps and watermarks; process forms, bookmarks, and annotations; and generate booklets, N-up/N-down layouts, grids, and posters.

Haskell

pdf-toolbox

Library

Haskell PDF library supporting on-demand/streaming parsing (without loading the whole file into memory) at both high-level (catalog, page tree, pages) and low-level (xref, trailer, objects, incl. xref/object streams) abstraction; extracts text with exact glyph positions; supports incremental-update editing, basic PDF generation, and partial support for encrypted documents.

Java

Images To PDF

Gui

Android PDF toolkit centered on creating PDFs from camera/gallery images (and converting text files to PDF), plus managing existing PDFs: merge, split, compress, remove/rearrange/rotate pages, extract images, and encrypt/decrypt.

Java

tabula-java

CliLibrary

Table-extraction library (powers the Tabula tool) that pulls tabular data out of PDFs using lattice mode (ruled cell borders) or stream mode (no borders), exporting to CSV, TSV, or JSON; usable as a CLI for batch processing or as a Java API, with support for selective pages, custom extraction areas, and password-protected files.

JavaScript

React-PDF

Library

Displays existing PDFs in React apps (built on PDF.js): renders pages via `<Document>`/`<Page>` with canvas, custom, or no rendering; shows outline/table of contents and thumbnails; selectable text and annotation/link layers; form rendering; page rotation and zoom; password-protected PDF handling; JPEG2000 and non-Latin (cMap) support. (Complementary to @react-pdf/renderer, which creates PDFs rather than displaying them.)

JavaScript

textract

CliDriverLibrary

Node.js module (CLI + API) that extracts text from HTML, PDF, DOC/DOCX, ODT, RTF, XLS/XLSX/XLSB/XLSM, CSV, ODS, PPTX/ODP, XML, Markdown, EPUB, and image formats (PNG/JPG/GIF via Tesseract OCR); wraps external tools (pdftotext, antiword, tesseract, unrtf) and supports password-protected PDFs and configurable OCR language.

JavaScript

vue-pdf

Library

Vue 2 component for displaying PDFs from URLs, file paths, or binary data: page navigation, 90°-increment rotation, password-protected PDF handling, per-page or range printing, load-progress tracking, text extraction/selection, clickable internal links, and rendering multiple page instances at once.

Stale
JavaScript

pdfh5

Plugin

Framework-agnostic (with Vue/React support) web PDF preview plugin built on PDF.js: touch gestures (pinch-zoom, double-tap, scrolling), selectable/searchable text layer, annotations (highlights, freetext, ink, stamps, signatures), password-protected PDF support, page caching for large files, print support, and a sandbox mode blocking JS injection/XSS.

JavaScript

react-native-pdf

GuiPlugin

React Native PDF viewer component: loads PDFs from URLs, local files, assets, blob data, or base64 (with optional caching); page jumping, page-by-page or continuous scrolling, pinch/double-tap zoom, and password-protected PDF handling. Uses PDFKit on iOS, PDFium on Android, and a native implementation on Windows; also supports Expo via a config plugin.

Objective-C

Skim

Gui

Open-source (BSD) macOS PDF reader and note-taker for reading and annotating scientific papers: adding/editing notes and highlights (with one-swipe highlighting), exporting notes as text, TOC/thumbnail navigation with visual history, full-screen presentation mode with transitions, snapshots, bookmarks, Spotlight search, LaTeX/SyncTeX/PDFSync integration, BibDesk compatibility, Keychain-saved passwords, and extensive AppleScript support.

Perl

CAM::PDF

Library

Perl module (PDF 1.0–1.5) for reading and writing PDFs: extract/delete/duplicate pages, get page text/content trees, append/prepend pages from other PDFs, handle password-protected documents and permissions, list/add fonts, list/fill form fields, remove annotations, detect linearized PDFs, remove unused objects, and apply compression filters.

Stale
Perl

Image::ExifTool::PDF

Library

Component of Image::ExifTool that reads metadata from PDF files, including support for PDF-1.5 object streams (limited Filter/Predictor algorithms) and all standard PDF encryption methods through PDF-2.0 (including AESV2/AES-128 and AESV3/AES-256).

PHP

pdf-to-image

DriverLibrary

Converts PDFs (via ImageMagick + Ghostscript) to JPG/JPEG/PNG/WebP images: render specific or all pages, control quality/DPI/dimensions/background color, read page count and page dimensions, and handle password-protected PDFs (requires ImageMagick 7).

PHP

pdf-to-text

Cli

Thin PHP wrapper around the `pdftotext` CLI binary that extracts text from a PDF, with support for a custom binary path, password-protected PDFs, and passthrough of pdftotext options (e.g. layout preservation).

Python

pikepdf

Library

Pythonic wrapper around qpdf for reading, writing, and manipulating PDFs: merge, split, rotate, rearrange, and delete pages; read/write XMP and DocumentInfo metadata (auto-synced); losslessly extract or replace embedded images (preserving original JPEG compression); open password-protected files and save with RC4, AES-128, or AES-256 encryption (or remove it); linearize for 'fast web view'; direct object-level/content-stream access; automatic repair on open; access to qpdf's Job API; and Jupyter notebook preview rendering.

Python

pypdf

Library

Pure-Python PDF library: split, merge, crop, and transform pages; add passwords/encryption and decrypt (with optional AES support); read and add metadata; extract text; read and create annotations; and attach custom data/viewer settings. Companion CLI tool `pdfly` offers additional command-line operations.

Python

pdfplumber

Library

Extracts text (with layout preservation, tolerance settings, regex search, and word bounding boxes), detects and extracts tables (via ruling-line or text-alignment strategies), and provides low-level access to characters, lines, rectangles, curves, images, annotations, hyperlinks, and form fields, with page cropping/filtering, password-protected PDF support, and visual debugging (page-to-image rendering with overlay annotations, incl. Jupyter display). Does not generate, modify, or OCR PDFs.

Python

Pdfminer.six

Library

Pure-Python PDF-1.7 parser/extraction library: text, images, HTML, or hOCR output with exact text location/font/color data; AcroForm and tagged-content extraction; outline/TOC extraction; embedded image extraction (JPG, PNG, TIFF, JBIG2, bitmaps); CJK and vertical-writing support; Type1/TrueType/Type3/CID fonts; RC4/AES decryption; and decoding of ASCIIHex/ASCII85/LZW/Flate/RunLength/CCITTFax compression filters.

Python

PDFMiner

Library

Original PDFMiner: text extraction with location/font/size data, layout analysis, format conversion (HTML/XML), outline (TOC) extraction, RC4/AES decryption, and multi-font/CJK support.

DepreciatedStale
Python

pdf2image

Library

Wraps Poppler's `pdftoppm`/`pdftocairo` to convert PDFs (whole documents or page ranges) into PIL Image objects: PPM/JPEG/PNG output, multi-threaded batch conversion, grayscale mode, custom sizing, and password-protected PDF support.

Stale
Ruby

Origami

Cli

Pure-Ruby framework for parsing, modifying, and creating PDF files, with lazy on-demand parsing: compression filters with predictors, RC4/AES encryption (including Revision 6), digital signatures and usage rights, file attachments, AcroForm/XFA forms, and object streams. Ships CLI tools including `pdfcop` for detecting dangerous PDF content (not a full malware-analysis/forensics suite by the author's own description) plus decompression, decryption, encryption, resource-extraction, and metadata-inspection utilities.

Stale