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I have secured PDF documents to prevent printing and saving the document. Why PDF plugin built into Firefox allows you to skip the security?

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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I am using PDFfactory to secure the PDF documents in my company. Despite this, users can open the document in Firefox and print, and save it locally. This is unacceptable because of the ISO standards process in my company. Please help ASAP.

I am using PDFfactory to secure the PDF documents in my company. Despite this, users can open the document in Firefox and print, and save it locally. This is unacceptable because of the ISO standards process in my company. Please help ASAP.

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dzuniek said

I am using PDFfactory to secure the PDF documents in my company. Despite this, users can open the document in Firefox and print, and save it locally. This is unacceptable because of the ISO standards process in my company. Please help ASAP.

I think the first course of action would be to try securing with a different authoring program (if you have access to one) and seeing if you have the same problem.

As for the downloading and printing side of it, even with a protected PDF, anyone with the intent and a little knowledge will be able to download it. Or screenshot each page in their viewer. One way to prevent them getting a usable print is to create a solid annotation field across each page of the document. It will be invisible whilst just being viewed but when printed the annotation field will cover everything, thereby producing a blank page.

Is it fair to ask whether a pdf is the best way of presenting information that you do not want them to download and subsequently print, seeing as that is exactly the reason PDF's exist?

Modified by ITSNZ

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Any PDF Viewer other than the Adobe Reader is likely able to bypass such a flag in the PDF file and any document that can be viewed in the browser can be saved via screenshot software.