Restrict Editing on PDF...with one exception.

[earl]

My customer wants to restrict editing on PDF files, EXCEPT leave the ability to extract pages. With the new Acrobat Pro, even a rasterized PDF is easily converted to text for editing.

 

[Dov Isaacs]

Nothing has changed with Acrobat in any releases over the last several years in this regard.

What your customer needs to do is use the protection mechanism within Acrobat to disallow changes but allow page extraction. It works (I just tried it myself).

Of course using rasterization as a “protection mechanism” won't work since OCR (available for quite a while in Acrobat) can be used to create text from images. Plus, rasterization not only bulks up the size of a PDF file, but effectively ruins its quality.

- Dov

 

[earl]

The choice in Acrobat Security is worded : "Changes Allowed: Any except extracting pages" Which is opposite of what I'm trying to accomplish, unless it's worded funny and I'm misunderstanding. Thanks Dov. Appreciate your reply.

 

[PrintIT]

See attached images - I put these settings on a PDF, and I think they give the results you want - Everything is restricted except page extraction.

 

[Dov Isaacs]

See attached images - I put these settings on a PDF, and I think they give the results you want - Everything is restricted except page extraction.

Yes, this is what does in fact work; I actually tried that before posting my response above. You can modify it to allow printing as well as extraction.

- Dov