Today I removed protection from 16k PDFs. All these files represent the BCP for a document management system.
In a few days the BCP is needed for real and a few legacy thin clients in production (and that cannot be updated for the time being) cannot manage PDFs with protections (like comments or printing)... so... since the files are however read-only and that the thin clients are not connected to printers... the most easy thing to do was to remove the protections in order to restore the compatibility.
#Ghostscript handles this kind of use case pretty well, even if I needed to open the files three times in the worst case scenario. The first time to check if it was protected or not, the second time to remove the protection, and the last time to check if the removal succeeded. In case of errors I needed to not overwrite the original file to manually check it later... but luckily everything went fine.
Using a single-threaded #Powershell script it took ~7 hours to run.
Probably, I could reduce this by a huge amount if I try to parallelize the file scanning... That would be my first! Wish me good luck for tomorrow!
. It will create prepress-ready PDF/X from any PDF. Note! If you want total control over CMYK/spot colors use Scribus, but if your demands are simple (RGB=>CMYK) it might work for you...
