Security features are in place to protect copyright. They were unsuccessful from the beginning. A stubborn user could rewrite the text, a smarter one could use image analysis and its conversion to text, and a wealthier one could simply buy Adobe Acrobat Pro.
PDF and Copyright
Copyright applies whether or not you manage to circumvent the protection. Therefore, we do not recommend stealing someone’s project, but we encourage you to share your achievements in a way that allows them to be used and edited. If, on the other hand, you edit someone else’s PDFs and send them on, put information about the sources you use in the footer. Once to show that the author of most of the information is someone other than you, and two so that the changes you made could not be attributed to him.
Do not hesitate, however, when, for example, an office located in the dark of the Middle Ages sends you a questionnaire or a PDF document to complete. You don’t need to print and fill it out manually if you can edit PDF.
PDF Security – What can you protect?
There are several protections you can put on a file. The important information is that security does not have to be in place when creating the file. Security can be added to an existing PDF file.
- Creating encrypted PDF documents with a password
- Password-protected PDF editing and extraction
- Blocking before printing a document,
- Text copy block
- Protection against adding annotations
- Protection against adding or removing pages from PDF
- Blocking from filling in forms and adding comments
- Text rasterization
Ways and methods of securing PDF documents
Online websites
Some websites have a free PDF security option. All you have to do is upload the file to such a page, choose the appropriate security. After a while, the application will generate a new file that you can download to your hard drive.
A dedicated PDF encryption tool
SwifDoo PDF is a free PDF manipulation program, one of its features is the ability to put security on PDF files. It works on the same principle as websites. You select a PDF file, set security, the software generates the file.
Using this SwifDoo PDF program is the best way to secure your PDF file. It allows you to implement a password for editing a PDF file and set text copying, printing and modification locks. Rasterization additionally protects such text, because copying the content involves the use of OCR text analysis programs.
How to password protect a PDF file with SwifDoo PDF?
To protect a PDF with a password, we need to use an external program. SwifDoo PDF – which we can download for free from our download section, will be perfect for this purpose.
We run the program. Click on the open PDF file icon in the center of the screen.
The file will be opened automatically. In the upper menu, select “Encryption” under “Protect” and enter the password with which the document is to be protected.
We can also add a password for permissions, which may be different from the password for opening. Thanks to this, we will additionally secure the possibility of editing, copying or printing. The exact permissions available after entering the password can be customized by selecting the appropriate options.
The last step is to indicate the folder where the created PDF file with the password is to be saved. When everything is ready, click “Apply“.
Ready. From now on, opening a document will require entering a password.
In Closing
Above you have some tips on how to edit a PDF. They are all effective, and some will also allow you to convert PDF to formats used by modern mobile devices, such as the SwifDoo PDF editor. Now you can freely change files, which will probably be very useful to you, for example, when preparing presentations, papers and some official letters.
You know that if someone explains that a file cannot be edited, they have not used all available tools.