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Reader-enabled PDFs: no restrictions

maverill
Registered: Aug 26 2009
Posts: 1
Answered

This message appears before Reader-enabling a PDF in Acrobat Professional 9...
Note: Once Reader Enabled, certain functions such as editing document content or inserting and deleting pages, will be restricted.
I'd like to have a non-restricted, Reader-enabled PDF as a final document. Is this possible? If so, how?

Mary Averill

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 9.4.3, Macintosh
UVSAR
Expert
Registered: Oct 29 2008
Posts: 1357
Accepted Answer
No it's not.

The message indicates that once Reader-extended rights have been applied, you cannot make further edits to the PDF in Acrobat without invalidating those rights. Reader-extending a file signs it using a private key, and if the PDF file changes after that point other than in the ways permitted by the key (commenting, form-filling, etc.), the hash calculation for the signature will fail.
gkaiseril
Online
Expert
Registered: Feb 23 2006
Posts: 4307
Not possible.

The message is for Acrobat users warning them that because of these rights, they will not longer be able to edit the PDF. To do that, they will need to save the PDF as a different file to remove the extended rights.

Reader can never edit a PDF.

George Kaiser

smadwin
Expert
Registered: Jul 10 2009
Posts: 40
Hi Mary,

I'm going to expand a bit on what George mentioned.
1) Open the Reader Enabled file in Acrobat Pro
2) Select the File > Save a Copy menu item
3) Click the Save a Copy button on the alert dialog that warns you are about to remove the Reader extended features
4) Supply a new file name and then click the Save button
5) Open the file you just created (it doesn't open automatically like you get with "Save As")
6) Make your changes
7) Reader Enable the updated file

Steve

Steven Madwin
Software QA Engineer
Adobe Systems Incorporated
345 Park Avenue, MS-W15
San Jose, CA 95110-2704 USA
408.536.4343 p, 408.537.4053 f
Steven [dot] Madwin [at] adobe [dot] com