Is it possible to uncompress PDF by using Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Distiller?

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Alexey Popkov picture Alexey Popkov · Sep 15, 2013 · Viewed 17.1k times · Source

Most PDF files found on the Web have compressed and unreadable data streams. Is it possible to uncompress the internal content of a PDF file using Acrobat or Acrobat Distiller, allowing us to read the source code by a text editor?

P.S. This question is inspired by this answer which explains how it can be done with GhostScript.

Answer

Kurt Pfeifle picture Kurt Pfeifle · May 7, 2015

qpdf and pdftk have already been mentioned. To show the commands:

$ qpdf --qdf --object-streams=disable orig.pdf uncompressed-orig.pdf
$ pdftk orig.pdf output uncompressed-orig.pdf uncompress

mutool however hasn't been mentioned yet:

$ mutool clean -d -a orig.pdf uncompressed-orig.pdf

mutool is a command line tool which ships alongside the lightweight MuPDF PDF + document viewer.

I do not think you can achieve the uncompressing of PDF objects' streams with Acrobat or Distiller (unless you have additional payware plugins available).

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