How to secure a PDF???

Aiadi

Hi guys. googled for this and found so many solution to secure a PDF. basically what I am after is something that would prevent PDFs that I create from being edited or tampered with. I know that there isn't a full proof solution but at least something that would be difficult to crack by the not very techie. I am now confused as to what software to use and would appreciate and recommendation or insight. Thanks in advance for any help.

BenL

Are the people you are sending the document to likely to have a full blown pdf creator/edittor? or is it completely unknown.

Most home users/non techies would probably have Adobe Reader only.

If its an e-book or something you are hoping to make ££ from a more secure solution would be advisable but I have no advice on that.

Or print the docs and send.

sleep2much

any pdf can be screen captured and then a new pdf made out of that picture, photoshop is an easy way of doing this, so anybody who wants to change your pdf can do so, whatever you try to do, once it's open you can do what you like.

isofa

Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Professional both allow this, as do some other Pro packages. You can limit all sorts of extraction, printing etc via passwords. It is very straightforward and offers some powerful features. I do this for all important PDF documents I send to clients, to ensure nothing can be changed.

sleep2much stating that "any pdf can be screen captured" totally misses the point, and is flawed. You cannot create an editable PDF out of any screen capture, all you can do is can simply take a image screen shot, whether you resave that shot as a PDF is irrelevant, as it will not hold any true text, vector graphics, nor editing capabilities. In addition it will also be low screen resolution, zooming will look terrible, and of course, quality printing will be impossible. A screen capture will not print any higher than 72dpi. A professional coded PDF can hold pre-press and press resolution and if it's pure text or vector based graphics it can be resolution independent.

The beauty of a PDF if that is can be editable, if you wish, to allow comments, users to copy/paste text. Once again, with a screen-shot copy can't do that either.

If a PDF is shown as copyright, and has been protected, taking a screen-shot and resaving as you suggest breaches these terms, and is piracy.

sco0ter

A quick search of the web will throw up numerous programs to unlock PDF files so they can be edited. They are extremely insecure and easy to unlock

ormus

they can only be secured against the average joe public.
anyone with a little bit of knowledge, and google, can break it.
did someone mention piracy? OMG does that really happen on the net?

sleep2much

http://www.sleep2much.com/pdf.html
can't edit a pdf? what I've done is a simple photoshop....bit of a big file size, but it's only a quickie.

bookduck

Looks like we are all shooting down your pdf idea.

omnipage which can read a pdf and convert it into word.

Have seen some documents that can only be viewed for a certain time or possibly to a certain date, can't remember the name.

Then there is the camera on a mobile phone. My canon 4 year old canon 3meg pixel takes really good readable shots of A4, so the new sony 5mp phones should be even better

isofa

But this is ridiculous, you are saying you shouldn't protect your work, because it's easy to break the copy system.

The OP was asking how you can protect a PDF against essentially standard uses who are "not very techie" - I quote.

Whilst nothing is truly secure, and most secured documents be them PDFs, Word, Excel, etc can all be "cracked" by some knowledge or searching, to do this you are knowingly or wilfully breaking it.

By this token do none of you lock your cars, because the majority can be broken into very easily by someone with the knowledge?

What a crazy standpoint, because you can download some illegal tools to break the security, obviously it's a waste to secure it in the first place?

Scanning and reading in text via an OCR, will not be able to render the page accurately if it has a complex design, if you want to waste enough time doing that to say a 50 page PDF, then you have more time on your hands then is good for you!

Presumably, people spouting this, never buy anything legal, because obviously it is all available illegally? So you don't buy CDs because they are easy to copy, you don't buy DVDs etc. However no doubt you are just the sort of people, who wouldn't go and actually steal something from a shop... Thought not...

Who said you couldn't edit a PDF? Of course you can, that's one of the key facts of the format. But to mess around in Photoshop is a very poor way of doing it, properly editing of a PDF is best in Illustrator as effectively the PDF format is an extension of the Illustrator native format... (and actually what you earlier stated was to take a screen shot and edit the image - a comedy low quality workflow IMO!

sco0ter

isofa wrote: »

But this is ridiculous, you are saying you shouldn't protect your work, because it's easy to break the copy system.

The OP was asking how you can protect a PDF against essentially standard uses who are "not very techie" - I quote.!

How techie do you have to be to type "Unlock PDF" into google??? Due to this and the fact most people who will view a PDF will have a PC and internet access then unlocking a PDF is extremely easy.

isofa wrote: »

By this token do none of you lock your cars, because the majority can be broken into very easily by someone with the knowledge?!

That is a totally different scenario. If the OP had asked if it would be ok to lock a car with selotape and leave the keys in the ignition he would have got the same type responses

isofa wrote: »

What a crazy standpoint, because you can download some illegal tools to break the security, obviously it's a waste to secure it in the first place?!

1. Who said the tools are illegal???
2. The OP asked for our comments.. He got them . Now he can either ask for other ways to secure the document or distribute it and we will help there as well. In my opinion distributing a locked PDF can easily be unlocked by the person recieving or someone he knows. The best way to get round this is to distribute in a format that cant be edited in the first place.

isofa wrote: »

Presumably, people spouting this, never buy anything legal, because obviously it is all available illegally? So you don't buy CDs because they are easy to copy, you don't buy DVDs etc. However no doubt you are just the sort of people, who wouldn't go and actually steal something from a shop... Thought not...!

Now you have me with this rant as I just cant see what you are trying to say. People here gave an opinion. If you want to give the OP advice telling him to distibute his work as a locked PDF then thats up to you but you are giving him bad advice.

djbd1973

isofa wrote: »

Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Professional both allow this, as do some other Pro packages. You can limit all sorts of extraction, printing etc via passwords. It is very straightforward and offers some powerful features. I do this for all important PDF documents I send to clients, to ensure nothing can be changed.

sleep2much stating that "any pdf can be screen captured" totally misses the point, and is flawed. You cannot create an editable PDF out of any screen capture, all you can do is can simply take a image screen shot, whether you resave that shot as a PDF is irrelevant, as it will not hold any true text, vector graphics, nor editing capabilities. In addition it will also be low screen resolution, zooming will look terrible, and of course, quality printing will be impossible. A screen capture will not print any higher than 72dpi. A professional coded PDF can hold pre-press and press resolution and if it's pure text or vector based graphics it can be resolution independent.

The beauty of a PDF if that is can be editable, if you wish, to allow comments, users to copy/paste text. Once again, with a screen-shot copy can't do that either.

If a PDF is shown as copyright, and has been protected, taking a screen-shot and resaving as you suggest breaches these terms, and is piracy.

I go along with isofa as I too use the professional version of acrobat and I will add that as well as restricting the editing, copying and printing of PDFs by passwords, you can also password protect the opening of PDFs too. The level of security that Adobe have put in on the new version is pretty good and these restrictions would stop the average Joe.