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Topic: Is there a way to create secure Acrobat 4 PDFs using v6?
Conf: (P-PDF) Acrobat 6.0, Msg: 117140
From: Longsj
Date: 8/12/2004 02:35 AM

Greetings,

I went to the general forum with a similar topic under the title, "Converting finished PDFs to be backwards compatible." The issue was left essentially unresolved because of a compromise struck with the company web master. The issue has resurfaced again as there has been a complaint about the inaccessibility of a PDF we created.

My company is a subsidiary of a large international corporation. Here we're using Acrobat 6 Reader and Acrobat 6.0.1 Professional but there are other areas of the main company that are still using Acrobat 5 or perhaps even Acrobat 4. ("Mother Ship" would prefer distributing Acrobat 3 PDFs but Acrobat 6 won't "Optimize" that far back.) The stuff we create here has to be accessible to people, employees and clients, who aren't using Acrobat 6. On the face of it, upgrading to Acrobat 6 Reader is the easiest solution but implementing that solution is not so easy. There are strict software testing regimes recently implemented by "Mother Ship" that would require testing of Reader 6 before roll out to the main offices would be approved by the recently created 'IT Central' (a department which will soon be dictating our software decisions as well). There is also the fact that we can't tell clients what to do with their computers.

The nature of the documents is such that we need to secure them against changes and, in some cases, secure them against selection for copying and pasting.

Advanced>PDF Optimizer allows you to convert an Acrobat 6 PDF (created from one single document or created from an assemblage of PDFs) to an Acrobat 4 PDF but when you apply security and hit "Save" or "Save As" you wind up converting the file back to an Acrobat 6 PDF.

So, is there a way to create secure Acrobat 4 compatible PDFs using Acrobat 6 or do we have to go backwards in time and reinstall Acrobat 4 in order to accommodate the needs of other employees in the main company and our clients? (If reinstalling Acrobat 4 is our only option, how long before advances in OS and Office technology render that option useless?)

Thanks.
Steve

P.S. I realize that the security of Acrobat 6 created PDFs can be breached by using third party PDF products and that this vulnerability may extend back to Acrobat 5 and 4 PDFs but we've got to make a good faith attempt to secure these documents.