This question comes up a lot:
“I have the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, but not Acrobat Professional – can I still create a password-protected PDF?I don’t feel like paying $360 for Acrobat Professional
just for the ability to do encryption or password protection.”
The short answer is ‘yes’, but you’ll need another program to do it.
I recommend the FREE open source program PDF Creator 0.9.8 (16.8 MB).
Below are detailed instructions you can share with your employees and clients:
– (Part A) PDF Creator program installation instructions
– (Part B) Creating the password-protected and encrypted PDFs
– (Part C) PDF opening instructions
– (Part A) PDF Creator program installation instructions
– (Part B) Creating the password-protected and encrypted PDFs
– (Part C) PDF opening instructions
PART A – PDF CREATOR INSTALLATION (Boring Part)
- Download PDF Creator 0.9.8 from SourceForge
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ - Double-click the PDFCreator-0_9_8_setup.exe file and choose Run.
(If User Account Control pops up in Vista or Windows 7, click Allow) - Select your language (English) and click OK.
- When the setup Wizard launches, click Next.
- Accept the license agreement, and click Next.
- For Type of Installation, choose Standard installation, and clickNext.
- For Printer name accept the default of “PDFCreator”, and click Next.
- On Select Destination Location, accept the default and click Next.
- The installation will install the PDFCreator Browser Add On (annoying) but you can later uninstall via the Control Panel.
Uncheck “Yahoo!” and click Next. - Under Select Components, accept the defaults and click Next.
- On Select Start Menu Folder accept the default and click Next.
- On Select Additional Tasks accept the defaults and click Next.
- And then click Install and click Finish when the installation is complete.
Now that the PDF Creator program is installed, it’s time to convert a file into a password-protected PDF.
PART B – CREATING A PASSWORD-PROTECTED PDFs
(Interesting Part)
(Interesting Part)