How to Protect PDF Today Blog

The Web has officially changed the face of business and in case no one has done this for you already, let me welcome you to the “PDF Data Age”.

PDF files on the Internet are not merely a fad or a flavor of the week.  It an important way for business to distribute information in a secure way, and it’s here to stay.  Most successful businesses are profiting from making PDF info available on the web.

Why  should you place your PDF files online?  Though there are many good reasons, here are five key ones:

1. PDF files on your site are expected.  The Net is one the primary places individuals look to seek out out additional about you, your business, and/or your product. If you do not make your info available, it can damage your credibility.

2. PDF files on the web are cheap.  Never in history contains a marketing medium been offered to all businesses, regardless of the size of your company.

3. PDF files on the web are immediate.  We live in a world of instant gratification.  We need everything yesterday.  If something isn’t immediately on the market, we simply could lose interest or worse yet get it from elsewhere – like your competition.

4. PDF files on your site are 24/7.  The Net never sleeps.  Having and implementing a good Web strategy can be like having a well tuned sales force doing your bidding around the clock.

5. PDF files on the web are global.  Why limit your business to the fifteen minute radius surrounding your workplace?  Your competition definitely isn’t and new competitors are seemingly coming back out of nowhere every day.

Take a look at the Web as a means to share your genius with prospects through PDFs, who otherwise may not have the opportunity to see what you’ve got to offer.

Need to protect PDF files, without using a password. And do it quickly? One easy way to prevent unauthorized circulation of your PDF documents, is to imprint the name of the authorized person or company directly into the PDF, so it cannot be removed.

That way, you should know where the unauthorized release of information originated. At the very least, it makes people a little less willing to distribute PDF files, if they know their name will be all over the PDF document.

Here is a free way to do this;

1. Go to http://Stamp.la

2. Select the PDF file you wish to stamp the name of the company or person on

3. Click UPLOAD FILE to bring the file into the system for processing;

4. Enter the name and email of the person whom you wish to imprint into the PDF document

5. The Stamp.la system will then give you a link for download of the imprinted PDF file

6. Download the PDF

7. When you open the protected PDF file, you can see that the person’s name and email is imprinted on every page, in the lower-left hand corner;

This method of protecting your PDF files is effective to a small degree, we recommend additional PDF methods, such as license code entry and live PDF access monitoring, for more effective PDF security.

If you are dealing with standard password PDF security (which we do not recommend) Advanced PDF Password Recovery enables you to recover PDF passwords and instantly remove PDF restrictions, according to specialist software research outfits. They claim you get access to password-protected PDF files quickly and efficiently. Also allows you to instantly unlock restricted PDF documents, by removing printing, editing and copying restrictions.

Advanced PDF Password Recovery recovers (or instantly removes) passwords protecting or locking PDF documents which have been created with all versions of Adobe Acrobat or many other PDF applications.

Book Guard Pro does not recommend the use of password security for a variety of reasons. Let’s take a look at the  features and benefits of PDF password recovery software, as stated by the manufacturers, to see the dangers PDF publishers are exposing their PDF ebooks and other PDF documents to, by using passwords alone;

* Supports all versions of Adobe Acrobat, including Acrobat 9
* Supports GPU acceleration
* Supports all third-party products producing PDF files
* Instantly unlocks PDF documents with printing, copying and editing restrictions
* Removes “owner” and “user” passwords
* Recovers passwords to open
* Supports 40-bit and 128-bit RC4 encryption as well as 128-bit and 256-bit AES encryption
* Patent-pending Thunder Tables technology recovers 40-bit passwords in a matter of minutes
* Dictionary and brute-force attacks with user-defined masks and advanced templates
* Three editions to satisfy the most demanding and savvy customers
* Optionally removes JScript code, form fields and digital signatures
* Batch mode allows automatic processing of multiple files
* Highly optimized low-level code optimized for modern multi-core CPUs

Adobe has said it expects updates for Adobe Reader 7 and 8, and Acrobat 7 and 8, to be available.

If you’ve chosen to read PDF documents using the popular alternative to Adobe — Foxit Reader — you also need to update. Foxit has released an update that fixes at least three serious vulnerabilities in its Reader products. That update, which brings Foxit Reader to version 3.0, is available from here.

Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer, with very small size, breezing-fast launch speed and rich feature set. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7. Previously, you’ve had to download a huge PDF reader from another software company, such as Adobe, go through a lengthy installation process and wait for an annoying splash window to disappear just to open a PDF document.

Many people find Adobe Reader is a real pain to use. It’s monstrously large. Very slow to load. And includes many features most users will hardly ever need. On the other hand, Foxit PDF Reader 3.0 kills the additional, often unneeded features and throws in some useful additions, such as multimedia support plus content-sharing options. Yet still allowing you to quickly access your PDFs.

The interface is similar to Adobe’s, so you won’t have to change your PDF reading habits.

In a recent test, the text readability was similar. The small program starts surprisingly fast compared with Adobe Reader. You might need to make a few adjustments to get it to work with your Internet browser. But you can find help on Foxit’s support forums.

It’s a good feature that it opens PDFs from the Internet in their own Foxit window – instead of taking resources from within the open browser you are using.

Foxit’s biggest flaw used to be hogging memory. However this has now been corrected. Recent updates include fixing the hyperlink problems, multimedia support, printing highlighted-only sections, and tabbed PDF browsing.

Now, you can read multiple PDFs simultaneously and with ease. Overall, unless you’re tied to Adobe we strongly recommend Foxit, this freeware PDF competitor to Adobe’s older and more bloated PDF reader.

It’s pretty clear that PDF files are the new “must use” when it comes to document handling. Who doesn’t use a PDF nowadays? They are smaller than other similar files, can be viewed on Windows, Linux and MAC, and anyone can protect their PDF files with encryption and password. Because of the wide variety of free conversion tools available today, everybody can convert whatever files they want to PDF.

Students use a large variety of operating systems on their computers. Teachers can make sure that their courses will be viewed properly by converting them to PDF files. Universal deployment is maybe the most important asset of PDF format.

Companies and business users can keep their internal documents as PDF files, benefiting from their smaller size and making sure those files are read only by employees who know the password. PDF security is another important feature that made the PDF format so popular.

Finally, home users are using PDF files because Adobe did a very smart thing: Adobe Acrobat Reader is used only for viewing PDF files and is free. This way they made sure PDF format is available for everybody.

After PDF files became widely used, some new needs appeared. Users wanted to extract only a couple of pages from a PDF files. This could be done only by using dedicated software: a PDF splitter tool. Also, somebody at one point wanted to combine two or more PDF documents into a single file. They needed a PDF merger tool. Adobe made those tools, but they were not free. And because of their branding and marketing costs, those tools were pretty expensive.

Luckily, free tools emerged during time, but they were not developed by Adobe. Third party publishers made them available to public use, trying to gain a market share.

PDF Sam is the most popular tool that can be used to merge and combine PDF files. Originally started on the Source Forge platform, it is developed in Java and comes in two editions: a free one, and for those who donate any amount, an enhanced edition. It offers the basic PDF split and PDF merge operation, and in the enhanced version, file encryption.

Adolix Split and Merge PDF is quite a young entry in this market. Adolix developed this tool in Visual Basic, and focused on the graphical user interface. Their aim was to make it as user-friendly as posible. Following PDF Sam steps, Adolix’s tool was first available as a free edition. Users could split and merge PDF files with just a few mouse clicks. At some point they also offered a Professional edition. Users could merge more than 5 files at once and split large documents into PDF files with the PRO version.

Other vendors also released tools to handle the split and merge PDF process. Adult PDF, Very PDF, AcroPDF and NitroPDF are only a few of the companies that entered the market with free or paid versions of those type of tools.

Ted Peterson uses Adolix Split and Merge PDF to combine PDF files.