How to restrict from printing and saving

You can turn off the print option within Acrobat's document security, but it's trivial for people to turn back on if they want to. There's no way to control people saving copies of a PDF - even if you use DRM, they still always have the ability to save the file - PDFs cannot stream so saving a copy is the only way they can open it.

thanks for your reply,

i can disable the print where as the save is not in our hands..right?
is there any other solution for saving restriction.

Rather every time i need to go for settings and give restrictions on printing, any direct method for bulk pdf documents?


one more question is

there are two users: say it as admin and user

admin can print any of the document where as the user cannot.

how to give the setting based on users?

With the current PDF workflow there's no option to control who can save or copy a PDF file, only who can open it (via DRM, etc.) - Copying or moving the physical file on disk is handled by the user's operating system, and nothing inside a file can interfere with that. Acrobat/Reader/Content Server don't yet support the idea of streaming PDF data (showing it without saving it first).

You can create a new security policy inside Acrobat and apply it using a batch command to a folder full of PDFs, or create a new Distiller preset including that security policy (to make new documents automatically adopt it).

As to 'admin' vs 'user' - the simplest solution is to give one of then the password you used to restrict printing, so they can bypass it. However the same password also restricts editing and extracting, so they'd be able to do that too. It's not yet possible to secure printing separately from editing.

"You can create a new security policy inside Acrobat and apply it using a batch command to a folder full of PDFs, or create a new Distiller preset including that security policy (to make new documents automatically adopt it)."

can you tell me how to create a batch sequence in acrobat standard 9?

I have gone through the tutorials: http://www.acrobatusers.com/tutorials/2007/10/baking_batch_of_pdf/

but it is not applies to standard.

Batch scripting inside Acrobat is only possible with the Pro and APEX versions, but Acro Std can be "automated" to an extent by using the external API - you'd need to write a program to do the controlling though, and it's far from an entry-level concept.

See the links in this thread: http://www.acrobatusers.com/forums/aucbb/viewtopic.php?id=18955

It's worth saying there are other software products which can make PDFs apart from Acrobat, and some of these will allow you to apply security or run batch commands. If your PDFs are all being served from a web application then it might be worth looking at PHP-PDF libraries (Google for "FPDI_protection"), which can read the unsecured PDF file from disk, apply security and push it to the viewer. In that way you can even give people personalized passwords or watermarks.

In Password security settings , if i enable the setting of password to the document and restrict printing of document both then,

I can see the password box and printing is disabled for the document in my acrobat standard.If i save it through web my application in another system where acrobat standard is not there.Then it allows me to print!!!


When i disable printing of a document,the printing is disabled in my acrobat standard.Here i checked only restrict printing of document and saved it.It is working perfect in my web application.i cannot print even i save it in another system no matter of acrobat reader or standard.It is not allowing to to print.

is there any solution for restricting this?

can you explain what web application you're using and how you're "saving through"? Do you mean the web application is altering an existing PDF, or creating a new one?


Remember that the permissions password on a PDF is respected by Adobe (Acrobat and Reader) but some third-party PDF readers simply ignore it and allow everyone to print. If a user can see the PDF on their screen, they can print it by downloading a non-Adobe reader if they really wanted to.

Thanks for your reply..

i am using in apache tomcat server and just accessing a pdf which i gave settings.

http://localhost:8080/pdfdocs/sampleinvoice.pdf
http://localhost:8080/pdfdocs/sampleinvoice1.pdf

in my acrobat standard i gave no print setting to the first document,it is opening perfect in other systems also.

where as the second document is given with password and no print setting.It is opening correctly in my application because i am using acrobat standard.If i open it another system contains acrobat reader then it is showing the print option.

m bit congfused.

can't quite understand what the problem is - if you've made a PDF with a permissions or open password then downloading it via a webserver won't make any difference, and both Acrobat and Reader will respect it.

Acrobat won't allow the 'open' and 'permissions' passwords to be the same, but some third-party PDF creation tools will, and in those cases Reader can get confused - but you're making the PDFs in Acrobat so they should be working fine. Without being able to see the files, we can't really track down the problem.

By the way - please don't keep messaging us to read your posts - we will reply when we can, but AUC isn't a paid support service. We have jobs outside the forums.

Thanks for your time and support..



My issue has been solved..thanks once again

This can be done using Certificate Security.

Can you re-enable printing (at least momentarily) on a PDF file using Adoby reader when you have the password?