Last Updated: November 1, Tested. This article was written by Travis Boylls. Travis has experience writing technology-related articles, providing software customer service, and in graphic design.
He studied graphic design at Pikes Peak Community College. The wikiHow Tech Team also followed the article's instructions and verified that they work. This article has been viewed , times. If you know the password, you can unlock it using Adobe Acrobat Pro. These methods will only work if you can still view and print the PDF without a password.
If the PDF is encrypted and password-locked, preventing you from viewing the PDF in the first place, you will most likely not be able to bypass the security. Need help creating, merging, or converting PDF files?
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Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article methods. Related Articles. Method 1. Open Google Chrome.
Google Chrome is the app that has an image of a red, green, and yellow wheel with a blue dot in the middle. Download Google Chrome , if you haven't already done so. Drag the PDF into Chrome. Click Change.
It's in the sidebar to the left under the destination printer. Click Save as PDF. It's in the Change menu in the sidebar. This will successfully protect your PDF files from being copied. If you want to protect your PDF from copying, you do not need to select the option of "Enable copying of text, images, and other content. PDFelement is the best tool for setting up passwords to prevent unauthorized access to your PDF files, as well as unauthorized editing, printing, or copying of the file.
The content in a converted image can't be copied. For further instruction, click the link to learn how to convert a PDF to an image. PDFelement can not only help you to set a password and protect PDF but also enables you to protect PDF from copying by a digital signature, which is a mathematical scheme that can verify the authenticity of document content that was not altered in transit.
For detailed steps, please refer to the article about how to create a digital signature here. This is the method to protect PDF from copying without a password. If you want to protect your PDF from copying online, then the Hipdf tool is the best option.
This can either be installed on a device Windows, Mac, iOS, Android , run from a USB stick completely offline zero installation solution , or accessed via a web browser zero installation. When a user opens a protected PDF document the Viewer checks to see if the decryption key is available.
If it is not present then the Viewer checks with the administration server to see if the user is authorized to view the protected PDF. If they are, the decryption key is transparently relayed to the client and the protected document opens. DRM controls are enforced by the Viewer software.
Safeguard protects PDF files from printing — it disables printing of PDF documents by default so you do not have to apply any additional controls to stop a PDF being printed. As well as using Safeguard to stop PDF printing for specific or all documents, you can stop printing on a user basis — you can disable PDF printing for some users but allow printing for others using the same protected document you only have to protect the document once for all users rather than on an individual basis.
Documents can be protected with zero prints available to stop PDF being printed and then individual users can be granted print rights by altering the number of prints available. If you allow printing, you can limit the number of times a PDF can be printed by each user in order to stop users distributing high quality copies of documents to others.
Document watermarking is recommended if you allow printing to discourage photocopies being made — see PDF watermarking below. The important issue is not whether you can stop a PDF being copied but whether the recipient of the copied file can use it. If you encrypt a PDF with a password you can give a copy of the PDF to another user along with the password and they can use the file.
So the protection provided is worthless as a useful copy was made that could be used with others. Safeguard effectively stops PDF copying because a copy of the protected file is of no use to another user without the decryption key to open it.
Decryption keys are stored encrypted in a keystore which is locked to the device it was registered on — so only authorized users can open protected PDF files. Authorized users must be prevented from saving the PDF in unprotected format so no editing or saving options should be made available and unprotected files should never be stored on disk in temporary files where they could be easily recovered. For additional security the PDF Reader should prevent screen grabbing, and document owners should disable printing so photocopies cannot be made of printed documents.
If you are going to stop document sharing and editing then you have to stop Save As from being used so PDF documents cannot be saved in unprotected formats. The simplest way to do this is to not have the facility available to begin with.
Some products use JavaScript to disable the Save As menu item or short-keys, but JavaScript can be easily removed or turned off in a browser environment and so cannot be used securely. The only documents that can be copied are protected PDF files and they are useless to unauthorized recipients as they need the correct decryption keys to open them. You might want to think again.
The way every browser works is by caching information to disk. And browser environments are possibly the least secure of all because if no software is installed on a device then you have no control over the actual environment so stopping screen grabbing and printing to file drivers is not possible. See Secure Downloads for additional information on stopping downloads and copying. To stop the browser caching the PDF on the users system, they convert your PDF files to images when you upload them — so the document is no longer a PDF file but consists of just raster images.
However, this provides a poor user experience since images are slow to display and print, and features such as search, bookmarks, and annotations are unlikely to be available. However, if you encrypt a PDF file and the user does not have the decryption key to use it then it does not matter if they can download it.
And if you apply DRM and licensing controls then authorized users those given access will be restricted as to what they can do with downloadable PDF files for example not being able to share them with others. Many cloud based systems claim to stop PDF forwarding — however users can share their login credentials with others so they have access to your documents anyway. If a system uses document links then there is nothing stopping an authorized user emailing those links to other users along with the login information.
Some systems state that they lock PDF files to email addresses or domains but that just means that you have to login using that email address or any email address that belongs to the domain.
It does not stop PDF forwarding since authorized users can still give their login credentials to others. That is also true of 2FA codes which provide little extra protection. A Safeguard protected PDF file can be forwarded and emailed to another user but the recipient will NOT be able to view it unless the document owner has authorized them to use it. If you are the document publisher, you can email protected PDF files to users knowing that if they fall into the wrong hands they cannot be opened.
So if a protected PDF is accidentally forwarded to the wrong person they will not be able to use it. See also stop copying, downloading and emailing. This is because there are numerous free and paid for PDF password remover programs on the Internet that will remove Adobe Acrobat permissions passwords in seconds. Users can still add comments to PDF files if you allow this option , but PDF content is always protected from editing ensuring that your original content cannot be altered in any way.
In some PDF protection products, if editing is disabled you can still highlight and copy text. Safeguard stops users from copying text and other content within a document — there is no copy paste option available and text cannot be highlighted for selection so it cannot be copied and pasted into other applications.
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