Adobe Creative Cloud Design Tools All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 6: Securing Your PDF Files

In This Chapter

• Finding out about security in Acrobat
• Using passwords
• Setting limits for editing and printing
• Removing sensitive data from PDF files

You may think that because you've converted your documents to PDF (Portable Document Format) that they're secure. This isn't quite true because Adobe Acrobat includes tools for changing text and images, as well as extracting them for use in other files. For example, you can use several tools to modify text and graphics (see Chapter 4 of this minibook) or copy a passage of text.

Applying security provides you with control over who can view, edit, or print the PDF documents you create and distribute. You can restrict access to files so that users need a password to view them, or you can restrict certain features of Acrobat, which stops most users from manipulating your files. All Adobe applications recognize and honor security settings applied in Acrobat, but some software ignores Adobe's security settings or can bypass them altogether. For this reason, you should be careful with whom you share your most sensitive PDF documents because even secure PDF files can be accessed by skilled or determined hackers.

In this chapter, we discuss using security protection to limit access to PDF files and show you how to limit what users can do to the contents of your PDF documents.

Understanding Password Security

By requiring users to enter a password to open and view your PDF files, you limit access to those ...