General ⇒ PDF Security settings - Not allow copying content

[ojrlopez]

Hello everybody,

I am trying to generate a pdf from latex, and I need the pdf document to be only readable, I mean, nobody else can copy the content (neither text nor graphics).

I am trying to use the package pdflatex, but I haven't be able to achieve this. I am using MikTex 2.8 and TexnicCenter editor.

Please, if anybody knows how to define these security settings, it would be very helpful for me.

Thanks a lot.
Oscar

[josephwright]

You'll need to post-process the PDF. pdfTeX does not include the necessary code to do this (the idea being that a specialist tool is always going to work better for this type of thing).

[meho_r]

You may try with pdftk. But, you should know that, although you can set these permissions, you cannot actually protect .pdf since removing security from it is a trivial task, takes less than a second or two. If you set both user password (needed to open the file) and different owner password (needed to make changes), the file is a little bit more secure, but still not really secure.

[frabjous]

You could use dvipng or imagemagick or the GIMP, etc., to convert the PDF to a series of images (and perhaps even wrap them back up into a PDF); depending on the resolution settings, there might not be a big loss in quality (though there will be some). Then, someone would have to OCR the file to get back at the text, but there's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent that (no matter how much security you add to the file).