A while back I purchased an ebook in PDF format. When I tried to open it under my Linux laptop I got an unpleasant surprise, the ebook's author had used a font that wasn't available on my Linux box, therefore the ebook was unreadable.
I figured I can simply copy the text and paste it into a text editor or word processor, but to my dismay I found out it wasn't possible to copy text from the PDF.
I had heard about iText, a Java library used to create and manipulate PDF's. I studied the iText API and found out how to make a copy of the PDF with the copy/paste restrictions removed. I wrote some code to try it out, and lo and behold, I was able to copy and paste from my custom copy of the ebook.
I figured that just like I needed to remove those restrictions, many others out there probably had the same problem. I turned my home grown utility into a web application and posted it on my site: http://www.ensode.net/pdf-crack.jsf. It has been helping people remove those annoying restrictions for a while now.,
