Hello. First, let me explain what the options are in terms of protecting a PDF. There are three different types: 1. No protection. There's no encryption, no passwords, and anyone with the right software can read, modify, extract, print and whatever else they desire. 2. PDFs with an owner password. These can be opened and read by anyone, however there are some flags which are set which say "please don't edit this", "please don't print", and so forth. From a technical standpoint, there's nothing stopping anyone from doing these prohibited actions, but most software will respect these flags and only allow you to preform prohibited actions if you enter the correct owner password. 3. Then there are PDFs with a user password. These can not be opened, read, or processed in any way without the user password. There is encryption (RC4 or AES) which stops anyone from bypassing this, no matter what software they use. Once the correct password is entered, the file is decrypted and it treated like #1 or #2.
Now, to answer your question, the AccessPermission class is not related to encryption, however it is related to the owner password. You will not need to enter a password to open protected files (as long as there's no user password); you will only need the password to edit them. Just keep in mind that it's only going to stop people who didn't REALLY want to edit it. There's no way to use strong encryption to enforce the editability of the file. As long as the program can process the file enough to know what to render, then it has everything it needs to write out a copy and modify the copy. Hope this helps you understand how PDFs work, and how the class works. --Adam On 08/24/2011 08:19 PM, Ken Bowen wrote: > Hi Everyone, > > We have routines which create and fill out pdf forms using PDFBox. > After creating and filling the fields, we need to make all of them read-only. > Is there a global way to do this with PDFBox for a form? > Or do I need to go through and apply PDField.setReadonly(true) to each field? > > I've observed that org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.encryption.AccessPermission has > a bit for setting fields read-only, but it seems this class is only related > to encyrpted PDFs -- is this true? > > Thanks in advance, > -- Ken >
