PDFCreator provides you with several options to secure your PDFs. You’re able to encrypt your PDFs and set a password to prevent readers from making changes to your documents.
PDFCreator will also allow you to digitally sign your documents to attest their authenticity. See Signature for further information.
For all secure tasks an “owner password” is required. It is also called “edit password”, because it will be requested for actions without a permission (see below).
Furthermore you can Require a password to open PDF file. This is referred to “open” or “user password” and will be requested to open the PDF file.
You can set one or both passwords with Set passwords. The passwords that are not saved, will be requested before the conversion.
Note
The passwords are encrypted before they are stored by PDFCreator. The encryption can be reverted though and is only intended to avoid plain text passwords to be seen in the Registry.
For automatic saving, you must set all required passwords.
To delete saved passwords, just press Remove in the Set passwords dialog. Afterwards you must leave the Profile Settings with Save.
Encryption prevents unauthorized copying of information contained in the PDF.
PDFCreator can encrypt in three levels:
Low (128 Bit),
Medium (128 Bit AES) and
High (256 Bit AES).
Note
“High (256 Bit AES)” is only available in the PDFCreator business products. See PDF Tools.
We recommend to use “Low (128 Bit)” encryption only for compatibility reasons, because it is considered unsafe. Of course it’s still good enough, if you just don’t want your document to be directly viewable for everyone. We even still provide the “40 Bit” encryption in the Hidden settings.
Define what a viewer/user can do with your PDF file by setting the relevant permissions. At the same time you disable everything that is not selected. With the owner password you can perform the disabled actions.
Allow the user…
… to print the document
… to copy content from the document
… to edit the document
… to edit comments
… to print the document in low quality (requires Medium or High Encryption)
… to fill forms (requires Medium or High Encryption)
… to use a screen reader (requires Medium or High Encryption)
… to edit the assembly (requires Medium or High Encryption)