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Richard Crocker - Planet PDF Director of Content. Need product advice? Call us.
Dan Shea - Planet PDF Managing Editor. Need product advice? Call us.
"Securing PDF Files"

By Richard Crocker
Planet PDF Director of Content
Issue 5 for 2008

One great feature of PDF files is you can lock them so only certain people can open them, and you can apply more granular security controls to restrict how recipients use them. This lets you control different kinds of functionality independently and (depending on the type of security you use), allow/disallow it on a user-by-user basis. Here’s a few examples of the permission control you can use:

  • Allow/disallow printing
  • Allow/disallow copying text from pages
  • Allow/disallow collaboration with forms, digital signatures and annotation tools
  • Allow/disallow editing of text and other content
There are two methods you can choose from when securing your PDF files: password security and certificate security.

Password security is the method we’re all familiar with, as its commonly used for web sites, services, and software. With PDF files, if you know the open password you can open the file, and if you know the permissions password, you can change the permissions settings. In the PDF world, many PDF creators let you apply security to your PDFs at the time they’re created. There are also PDF viewing/editing tools that let you change or remove security settings and passwords of existing PDF files (providing you supply the correct permissions password, if required).

Certificate security is the lesser known method of securing PDF files. Instead of using and sharing passwords, participants share PDF files that can only be opened and used by recipients who have a trusted certificate. Certificate security can be better trusted because, unlike passwords (which can theoretically end up in anyone’s hands), certificates can be locked to an individual computer and protected so the certificate cannot be moved to another computer or otherwise used by an unauthorized person.

Nitro PDF Professional is a tool that allows you to apply both types of security to your PDFs. You can download the free 14-day trial and give it a test run to see which security method best suits your needs. Until next time, please browse PDF Store's Security aisle for more products.
Simple PDF creation using Acrobat
 By Dan Shea

Looking for a "quick and dirty" way to create PDF documents? Using Acrobat, creating PDF documents is just a single click away. This tip explains how.
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