Any free way to disable copying text in .pdf?

Question

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?

Solution 1

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

Solution 2

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

Comments

[Matt Ball]

What's the point? If they can read the text, they could just transcribe it manually or print+OCR.

[AlxSTi]

True - people are lazy sometimes though. I'd just like the security measure there (even as easily crackable as it is).

[endolith]

Why would you want to do this? People who have a need to copy it will just get around it anyway.

[Adobe]

Another way is to convert text to curves with ghostscript: gs -o output.pdf -dNoOutputFonts -sDEVICE=pdfwrite input.pdf.

[AlxSTi]

That's what I ended up doing. Good looking out!

[Julian]

link is not working properly anymore, could you put the most important info to the answer and make it valuable?

[jiwopene]

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.