non ascii password for protected pdf

Question

Hi all, I have a conforming writer and I want to generate password-protected documents using PDF-1.6 and AESV2.

When I look at the Encryption Key Algorithm in PDF32000_2008.pdf it always starts from a password string made of up to 32 bytes.

However, in the dialog box I present to the user when saving, I can expect any unicode character.

Should I restrict the user to compose their password only from plain ASCII characters?

I expect that some other "common" characters (e.g. the euro sign) might also be accepted, but in this case it is unclear how to encode them in a byte string (e.g. using PdfDocEncoding ?) for further processing.

Can anybody help me or point me to a specification other than PDF32000_2008.pdf?

rpaulin56 · Answer

Hi all, I found in PDF_ISO_32000-2.pdf the following: The password string is generated from host system codepage characters (or system scripts) by first converting the string to PDFDocEncoding. If the input is Unicode, first convert to a codepage encoding, and then to PDFDocEncoding for backward compatibility.

This should help for managing unicode passwords

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