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S
swirus
New Participant
August 6, 2020
Answered

Automating Password Encryption of PDFs using Acrobat Pro

  • August 6, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 3330 views

Hello There. I have recently been evaluating Acrobat Pro for several colleagues in my business area. 

 

The requirement is to automatically produce PDFs with unique passwords as per the title. The originating application is Excel. The previous solution used an app which is depracated in the organisation, but like Acrobat Pro provided a printer interface, through which you could specify the password when your PDF was being created, automating the process with VBA.

 

I've run out of evaluation period, so I can't experiment further, but I haven't been able to do this quite simple, extremely reasonable thing with Acrobat Professional. The only way to specify a password within Acrobat seems to be typing it by hand; Here are some of the things I tried:

 

- You can run an Action from the Acrobat Professional application when creating a PDF, but you can't ascribe multiple passwords on a per-document basis, only set the same password for all this way.

- There's a JavaScript interface in the main application which can be initiated from an Action. It doesn't seem to expose simple password encryption. 

- There's no command-line argument you can provide to the main application whereby you could specify the necesarry options to encrypt and provide a password.

- If you reference 'AdobePDFMakerForOffice' in VBA, you can see there is an object under ISettings called 'SecuritySettings' but I believe use of this interface is not documented or supported by Adobe.

 

Is there an easy way of automatically feeding a password to Acrobat at document creation? Am I missing something very obvious? Acrobat definitely produces the best looking PDFs, but we need a bulletproof 100% solution if we're going to meet the high per-seat cost of subscription. 

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer try67

It might be possible with a plugin. It's not possible with a script.
It is certainly possible to do it using a stand-alone tool, independently of Acrobat, which will not affect the quality of the file one bit.

2 replies

try67
try67Correct answer
Community Expert
August 6, 2020

It might be possible with a plugin. It's not possible with a script.
It is certainly possible to do it using a stand-alone tool, independently of Acrobat, which will not affect the quality of the file one bit.

    S
    swirusAuthor
    New Participant
    August 6, 2020

    Thanks for your helpful response, try67. I wonder what prevents this rather obvious convenience? I wonder if it is Acrobat's security model? 

     

    I read you loud and clear about the couple of command-line tools which are available, including some free and open-source ones. I have already completed some successful experiments with them. But they are not currently available through my corporate software centre, like Acrobat Professional is. If I have to go through the hassle of trying to qualify these options through our IT acquisitions process having paid for Acrobat, it makes me wonder why we're paying for Acrobat... We could just use these tools directly on native Excel PDFs; the business case for Acrobat is then moot.

    Bernd Alheit
    Bernd Alheit
    Community Expert
    August 6, 2020

    Why want you add password protection?

    S
    swirusAuthor
    New Participant
    August 6, 2020

    Posted a bit too quickly there, just wanted to add: Thanks in advance for any thoughts/comments 🙂

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