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Protecting specific parts of PDF

mgharris
Registered: Nov 30 2008
Posts: 5

OK, this has me stumped. I usually protect a document in its entirety, particularly when the document has signatures and the like, such as annual reports or documents with executive forwards.

This is good, however there is one specific user in our organisation (who just happens to be my boss), who doesn't like this and screams every time he wants to copy and paste some text out of a secured PDF into somewhere else.

Is there a way to protect specific areas or portions of a PDF file to protect these from being copied/altered?

Thanks in advance.

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 9.0, Windows
UVSAR
Expert
Registered: Oct 29 2008
Posts: 1357
You can secure a document but still allow copy-paste operations (tickbox in the security panel). It's not possible to apply security to only some areas of a page, or only some pages of a document, but you can combine several PDFs into a Portfolio and have different security settings on each of them (apply what you want before combining).

It's a bit of a kludge, but you could use that to pull out unsecured pages - however it's still a per-PDF security system.