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I'm providing a free sample page that will be downloaded from my website that is in .pdf format. I want to prevent users from selecting and copying the text content of that document. How can I do this for free?

AlxSTi
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    What's the point? If they can read the text, they could just transcribe it manually or print+OCR. – Matt Ball Jan 06 '11 at 01:57
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    True - people are lazy sometimes though. I'd just like the security measure there (even as easily crackable as it is). – AlxSTi Jan 06 '11 at 02:24
  • Why would you want to do this? People who have a need to copy it will just get around it anyway. – endolith Sep 20 '11 at 03:28
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    Another way is to convert text to curves with ghostscript: `gs -o output.pdf -dNoOutputFonts -sDEVICE=pdfwrite input.pdf`. – Adobe Oct 17 '16 at 15:54

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Convert the text to image before fetching it as a PDF.

pedrozath
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With Adobe Acrobat, you can create passwords to protect pdf files. But others can still use some pdf tools to crack passwords. Look at this article. http://www.anypdftools.com/blog/2009/05/12/create-and-crack-pdf-password.html#261

user404086
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  • That's what I ended up doing. Good looking out! – AlxSTi Jan 07 '11 at 03:17
  • link is not working properly anymore, could you put the most important info to the answer and make it valuable? – Julian May 02 '15 at 10:49
  • Please mind that the protection must be enforced *by the application* that views the PDF. The document still contains copyable text (and processable by other means) and there is quite a lot of viewer applications that either do not have this “functionality” implemented or allow user to bypass this protection. Also, for some other applications (`pdftotext`, to name one), such protection is not meaningful. – jiwopene Jun 24 '21 at 15:01