How to convert Word document to PDF with copy protection

Question

I need to convert a Word document to PDF file so that user would not be able to copy any text or anything from it (pdf file).

How can I do that?

Thank you.

Solution

You can set the not-copy flag in the pdf file using for example pdftk (there exists GUIs for it). You need to set an owner password.

But since many pdf readers ignore not-copy/not-print-flags, another option would be to convert all the text to vector paths using e.g. inkscape, but this would bloat the pdf file heavily.

In all cases, the user could use OCR-software to extract the text, so there is no safe solution.

Comments

[Bakhtiyor]

pdftk original.pdf output result.pdf owner_pw asdf allow Printing

[Bakhtiyor]

I have solved my problem using above pdftk command line. Thank you very much @jofel.

[Bakhtiyor]

inkscape option was best one though, but my word document contained more than 100 pages and I had no time to import all of pages one-by-one into inkscape and to convert it to pdf.

[jofel]

@sunk818 Please read my full answer - the last sentence includes this case.

[PhoneixS]

The link you wrote is broken.