Security permissions-- can I disable print to PDF?

[sandrah80731053]

I have a fillable form PDF contract that I'm having trouble with the securities on. We were having a problem with people using the comment tool or highlighter tool to cross out part of the contract, so I locked up all of that behind the password protection, but today I had an applicant who did a print to PDF to remove the securities and then edited it. I need them to be able to print it to a real printer, but not to be able to print it to an unlocked PDF, is there a way to do that?

[Amal. · Accepted solution]

Hi Sandrah,

Hope you are doing well and sorry  to hear that.

All the Adobe products enforce the restrictions set by the permission password. However, not all third party products fully support and respect these settings. Recipients using such third party products might be able to bypass some of the restrictions you have set.
Using  Microsoft print to PDF is a MS process of creating PDFs and it is not Adobe dependent.

Regards

Amal

[MikelKlink]

Your problem goes beyond disabling printing to PDF: In essence you cannot keep people from arbitrarily manipulating PDFs. As soon as they can view them, the whole PDF is open to them if they use the right tools.

What you can do, though, is make it easier to spot manipulations! If you apply a digital signature (certification with form fill-in allowed) to the form before providing it to applicants, you merely have to check whether the signature is still there and still valid, both cryptographically and in respect to updates. Adobe Acrobat does a decent job when checking signature validity.