How to make a pdf read only?

[David Schwartz]

PDF files can only be edited with something like Acrobat or a tool that lets you do that. 

So they’re effectively “read only” by default without the right tools.

Even then, when you create a PDF file, depending what you use, you can set an option that prevents or allows the text to be selected and copied to the clipboard.

But just about every OCR app in existence lets you feed it PDF files and get an editable Word or text file back.

Not to mention there are websites that will OCR a few pages of a PDF file for free.

(At my last job, they had a client with a couple dozen offices around the country. Someone at each office would grab a stack of invoices and drop them into a scanner every night and scan them; it would save the lot to a big PDF file that they’d upload to an FTP site on our server. I wrote an app that would periodically check for new files and run them through an OCR app to extract data from each invoice and put it into a database. The previous software would scan the entire page and save the results, although we only needed a few fields. Scanning only the parts of the page with the data we were looking for sped things up quite a bit. But the point is that the PDF files their scanners created were pretty useless even with Acrobat since they were just a big batch of scanned images.)

I think you’re asking the wrong question. Try stating the problem you’re actually trying to address.

-David Schwartz



> On Aug 10, 2021, at 12:42 PM, Shawn Badger via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
> 
> One option would be to turn it into an image which is then put into the pdf. Not impossible to change just more work to change.
> 
> On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 11:48 PM Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org <mailto:plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org>> wrote:
> joe--- via PLUG-discuss said on Fri, 06 Aug 2021 16:48:59 -0700
> 
> >How to make a pdf read only?
> >
> >I'm sure I've done this in the past,
> >but can't remember how. Searched the
> >net but found no solution.
> >
> >Do not want to convert to an image
> >but just want a read-only pdf.
> 
> I think it's impossible to make a truly read-only pdf. Somebody could
> always open it in Vim and tamper with it, or use one of the several PDF
> modification tools to convert it to a form that can be written to. Or
> import it into Inkscape, modify it as an image, and convert back to PDF.
> 
> If you mean make it so it's not modifyable in Acrobat, there's probably
> a way to do that.
> 
> SteveT
> 
> Steve Litt 
> Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
> Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques <http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org <mailto:PLUG-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org>
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
> https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss <https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss>---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
> https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.phxlinux.org/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20210810/dd0294b7/attachment.html>