How to lock, encrypt or password protect PDF files and give some security restrictions to PDF documents such as no copy, no print, no modify and etc? I agree that you can do those tasks with Adobe Acrobat but unfortunately the software is not free. So here I would like to give you an alternative, there is a free open source software that allows you to add PDF encryption and protect your PDFs from being opened / copied / printed / modified, the program called PDFCreator. Actually, in the past I had made a review about this PDF tool and you can read my PDFCreator review here.
Back to the topic, here is a few easy steps you need to do in order to password protect or encrypt a PDF file
Prerequisites
- A PDF document/file
- Your PDF reader (you can use Adobe Reader, Nitro PDF Reader or anything else as long as it has “print” option)
- PDFCreator. If you don’t have it yet you can download this application from SourceForge. And don’t forget to install the program into your computer.
Steps
- Open your PDF document with your favorite PDF reader.
- Click Print button or go to File – Print
- Switch the printer device, change to PDFCreator virtual printer
- Click OK and wait for a moment. Your last action will open PDFCreator main window, like the figure below:
- Hit “Options” button
- Now you are in the “Options” window. Don’t be confused by its interface, just select “PDF” on “Formats” sub menu (it’s located on the middle of left pane).
- Now take a look at the right pane and choose “Security” tab.Click (tick) on “Use Security” to activate encryption, password and permission menu.
- In this section you can customize PDF security such as create password to open, password to change permissions, and create restrictions such as disallow users to print the document, copy text and images, modify the document and modify comments.
- Depend on your needs, simply tick / select on which of them are necessary for you to protect your PDF file
- If you have done with PDF security customization, hit “Save” button.
- Click “Save” once again and then give a name and choose a target folder for your new secured PDF file
- Enter a new password to open (user password) and password to change permissions (owner password). And then click OK. Note: this window will appear only if you have selected on one or both of them in the security options
Done! That is it folks, now you can test your new PDF file. And here is my secured PDF document:
Users will be asked for a password to open my PDF file
Users are not allowed to print and copy text / images on this PDF document
