How to Protect Your PDF File from Printing and Converting

Sometimes we want to prevent people from doing this.  We are OK with users being able to open and read the PDF, but we want to prevent them from converting or editing the documents in any other way.

There are numerous reasons for this. Maybe the owner of the PDF is sharing sensitive information that can cause a lot of problems if changed.

The solution is to protect the PDF with an owner password. There are different levels of protection that we can set and modify, which helps us control how our document is used.

Have in mind that you should keep your password somewhere safe in case you forget it. If you forget it, you won’t be able to recover it, and your document will forever stay protected and impossible to convert or edit.

We are going to introduce two free ways to protect your PDF from unauthorized use.

1) PDFRider

PDFRider is a lightweight free software, which really does a good job in modifying PDF files. One of its many features is the possibility to secure PDFs.

Install the software, and open the PDF file within the tool.

After that, click on the Tools – Security.

Click on the Edit password, and enter it. You’ll see all the editing protection features, such as protection against printing, copying content, modifying annotations, and more. Each of these features ensures that the user is not able to convert the document.

As you can see here, we are adjusting the Edit password option. Users will be able to open the PDF but not modify it. However, if you set up the open password, nobody will be able to see the contents if you don’t provide them with the password.

Simple and easy. At the end you have to Save everythig. Go to Application – Save.

2) iSafePDF

This is another open source, free tool which performs really well. Its only drawback is that it might be a bit difficult to use.

Install the app and open it. Specify which PDF file you want to protect, and also where you want to save it. You can see that we have added an extra number following the document name, so that we don’t overwrite the original document.

Now, after you have specified what document you want to protect, go to the Encryption tab.

Enter the password you’ll be using. The tool works in the similar way as the previous app. You have one user password (the password needed to open the document), and an owner password (the password needed to edit the document). Below you have a checkbox where you can set and modify which rights the document will have. Uncheck everything you don’t want, for example, the ability to print, copy, modify the text and more.