I need to password protect my PDF file(s), because I am going to send them through email and I want anyone who would view my PDF file(s) to be prompted for a password.
How can I add a password to a PDF in Linux Mint 17.1?
Unix & Linux Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityI need to password protect my PDF file(s), because I am going to send them through email and I want anyone who would view my PDF file(s) to be prompted for a password.
How can I add a password to a PDF in Linux Mint 17.1?
You can use the program pdftk
to set both the owner and/or user password
pdftk input.pdf output output.pdf owner_pw xyz user_pw abc
where owner_pw
and user_pw
are the commands to add the passwords xyz
and abc
respectively (you can also specify one or the other but the user_pw
is necessary in order to prohibit opening).
You also might want to override the default 40 bit encryption strength by adding:
.... encrypt_128bit
pdftk depends on old libraries, and so is no longer in the repos of Fedora / CentOS. As a replacement, I prefer qpdf
qpdf --encrypt [readpass] [ownerpass] 256 -- [infile].pdf [outfile].pdf
The pdftk toolkit allows for this type of functionality on Linux.
CTRL+ALT+T
sudo apt-get install pdftk
pdftk
. You will see a bunch of pdftk command instructions if it already installedpdftk <source>.pdf output <destination>.pdf userpw <password>
Example:
pdftk Mydocs.pdf output Mydocs_pass.pdf userpw secretword
http://wildabdat.tumblr.com/post/13245065154/how-to-add-password-to-your-pdf-docs-on-ubuntu
You can also export an encrypted PDF file from Libre Office (File -> Export as PDF -> Security tab -> Set Passwords -> Set open password), if necessary importing your existing PDF into the Draw program first.
On Fedora, you can use pdf-stapler to set a password for a PDF file, and also perform other pdftk-like operations.
Example to set the user password (the one required for opening the file):
pdf-stapler -u QRNFFtVXA-8PqF cat input_file.pdf output_file.pdf
This is the password you think of most likely about setting a password to a PDF file.
In case you want to set the owner password (the one that defines permissions like printing, commenting, ect.), use the -o
option.
Using tools from the Poppler Toolset (from a package like libpoppler
or poppler-tools
), you can achieve this with a combination of pdftops
and ps2pdf
.
pdftops in.pdf out.ps
ps2pdf -sUserPassword=XXXXX -sOwnerPassword=YYYYY out.ps out.pdf
Note that to set a User (view) password, you must set an Owner (edit) password.