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?
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6 Answers
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
If you cannot run pdftk as it is no longer in every distro, you can try qpdf. Using qpdf --help gives information on the syntax. Using the same "values" as for pdftk:
qpdf --encrypt abc xyz 256 -- input.pdf output.pdf
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1Could be useful: askubuntu.com/questions/1028522/… (Docker is the easy way.) Jun 12, 2018 at 20:20
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
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1It seems that Evince (document reader) version 3.18.2 can only open PDFs which I encrypted with 128 instead of 256. Jan 3, 2020 at 17:32
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@gloschtla I used 256 and evince worked as expected. I'm still on Bionic, though (Ubuntu 18.04). Hopefully evince didn't go backward in newer versions. Mar 3, 2021 at 22:35
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FWIW: on Evince-3.36.7, unlocking the 256-bit version seems to work. Mar 24, 2021 at 11:08
The pdftk toolkit allows for this type of functionality on Linux.
- open your Ubuntu Terminal
CTRL+ALT+T - install pdftk by using this command:
sudo apt-get install pdftk - make sure pdftk is now installed by writing this on the terminal:
pdftk. You will see a bunch of pdftk command instructions if it already installed - simply use this command to add a password to your existing pdf document:
pdftk <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
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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.
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opening the non-encrypted PDF in LibreOffice Writer didn't work for me. Jan 3, 2020 at 17:13
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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.
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.
