Design Center article

Excerpted from “Adobe Acrobat 7 Tips and Tricks: The 150 Best”

If you find that you’re always assigning the same security settings to your Adobe® PDF documents, there’s an easy way to speed up the process. Create security policies in Adobe Acrobat® 7 and apply the policies as you need them—in much the same way you would apply styles to text.

Use and manage security policies

Acrobat 7 Professional provides one interface to manage all the security in your documents. If you want to add security to a document, choose Document > Security > Secure This Document or click the Secure task button and choose the command from the pull-down menu. The Select A Policy To Apply dialog opens, listing the policies available to use. Here, you can create new policies, copy an existing policy, view its contents, or refresh policies that are stored on the Adobe Policy Server.

If you have a large number of policies, you can filter the list for ease of use. Click the Show pull-down menu, shown in Figure 1, and select to display only organizational or user policies. Click a policy from the list at the top of the dialog to view its details at the bottom of the dialog. Click Apply and follow the sequence of dialogs and prompts to secure the document.

Figure 1: Select a filter to modify your list of policies.

When you want to work with your policies, such as changing the permissions or passwords within an existing policy, use the Managing Security Policies dialog instead to access additional options. Choose Document > Security > Manage Security Policies, click the Secure task button, and choose the command from the pull-down menu to open the dialog (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Manage the policies in your system from the Managing Security Policies dialog.

Both security policy dialogs are quite similar; in the Managing Security Policies dialog you can also edit an existing policy. Click the policy in the list and then click Edit on the dialog’s toolbar. A sequence of dialogs appears; their content depends on the type of policy you select. Click Delete to remove an existing policy from your system.

Regardless of the method you use to encrypt or secure a document, you can change or remove the protection from within Acrobat if you have the rights:

1. Choose File > Document Properties > Security.

2. In the Security pane, click the Security Method pull-down arrow and choose No Security (Figure 3). Click OK to close the Document Properties dialog.

   

   Figure 3: You can remove or change document security in the Document Properties dialog.

3. The confirmation dialog opens. Click OK to confirm that you want to delete the security and remove the passwords from the document.

For more information on working with security policies, see “Simplify security with security policies in Acrobat 7.”

Excerpted from “Adobe Acrobat 7 Tips and Tricks: The 150 Best” © 2005 Donna Baker. Published by Pearson Education, Inc. and Adobe Press. To buy this book, visit www.peachpit.com.