Adobe Acrobat Pro has the options of specifying permissions on PDFs to prevent recipients from performing certain actions.
In the attached ticket, Nathan pointed out that we don't provide those options and that it's a feature that some users may like to have as it gives them a better since of security. In Nathans case, the users complaint was that redactions could be moved and resized in Acrobat Pro which, although it didn't reveal any hidden content, could be manipulated by the receiver of the document.
Joshua Letcher
We have reviewed this feature and discovered that it is not possible to create a protected PDF that is truly protected. Acrobat has protection protocols that can be embedded in a PDF file but the issue is that third-party PDF readers ignore those protocols and will open the PDF and allow the user to edit it. Even if we implemented this feature, the PDF would not be protected from being edited and would only provide a false sense of security to the user. In other words, the Acrobat protection protocols for a PDF document are not secure. Adobe includes a warning in the interface that alerts the user that the output document is not protected in situations where the user is using a third-party tool to view and edit the document.
Because of this, there isn't value to adding this feature and would not help our customers that want to protect their PDF. The only way to prevent someone from editing a PDF is to burn the document to a raster image and then create a PDF from that raster image - a two step process.
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