combining secured documents

[Guest]

I work in an engineering firm. We place our engineer's stamps (seals) on pdf's of our drawings as adobe stamps. We then password protect our documents to protect them from being modified. This is required by the organization which regulates engineering in our area. We must secure and protect documents with our seals on them.

The problem we are having is that we often work with other consultants, such as architects. On these projects we have to send our sealed, and password protected, drawings to the other consultant. The other consultant then needs to bind, or combine, our pdf's into one larger pdf with all of the other drawings from the other consultants. The problems is this is impossible after we have secured (password protected) our documents. The only way around this would be to give the other consultant our passwords, which defeats the purpose of having the passwords.

Surely there is a way to address this. We need a way to be able to combine password protected documents without using the passwords. There is an option in the document security setting to allow inserting documents, but this only seems to mean that unsecured documents can be added to a secured document. For secured documents you have to have the password to be able to combine them.

Any suggestions?

[try67 · Accepted solution]

The only option (short of removing the password protection) is to combine the files into a single Portfolio, which basically just attaches all the files to a single PDF.

[Guest]

Thanks, that works pretty well.

One nice feature in adobe would be if the print setup were a bit more sophisticated and the print order could be manually set by dragging files to the appropriate location, rather than just printing in alphabetical order. It would be a bit tedious in a 80 page contract drawing set to rename the drawings so they print in the right order, or get everyone on the same page so that their naming conventions allow printing in the correct order.