Chapter 6. Securing Your PDF Files

In This Chapter

  • Finding out about security in Acrobat

  • Using passwords

  • Setting limits for editing and printing

You may think that because you've converted your documents to PDF (Portable Document Format) that they're secure. This isn't quite true because Adobe Acrobat includes tools for changing text and images, as well as extracting them for use in other files. For example, you can use the Select tool (see Chapter 4 of this minibook) to select and copy a passage of text or the Select Object tool to copy or edit graphics.

Applying security provides you with control over who can view, edit, or print the PDF documents you distribute. You can restrict access to certain features, which deters most users from manipulating your files. All Adobe applications recognize and honor security settings applied in Acrobat, but some software ignores Adobe's security settings or can bypass them all together. For this reason, we recommend that you share your most sensitive PDF documents only when you've applied security protection. This way, the only users who can open a file are those who know the password or have the correct certificate, depending upon the type of security applied to the file.

In this chapter, we discuss using security protection to limit access to PDF files and show you how to limit what users can do to the contents of your PDF documents.

Understanding Password Security

By requiring users to enter a password to open and view your PDF files, you limit ...

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