PDF Anti-Copy free download 2017
version 1.08.4release date 9 october 2017
Let’s say that you have to send a PDF document to your friend Bob and you want Bob to be able to open and read the document, but you don’t want him to be able to copy any of the text. By using a free tool called PDF Anti-Copy you can achieve precisely that. Your friend Bob will be able to open and read the PDF document, but he won’t be able to copy anything. And if Bob is sly enough to try and convert the PDF document into a convertible format like Microsoft Word, he’ll end up with a blank document.
PDF Anti-Copy is available as an installer and as a portable version. PDF Anti-Copy is compatible with any 32- or 64-bit Windows edition, starting from Windows XP and going all the way to Windows 10.
Load a PDF document into PDF Anti-Copy and the panel on the left hand side will list its pages. Select a page from the list and the panel on the right will preview it. Those are the main two elements that are displayed on this application’s interface, interface that provides support for multiple languages by the way.
Using PDF Anti-Copy is a very simple 3-step process:
Step 1 – load a PDF document into the application and select if you want to protect all the pages or just certain pages.
Step 2 – choose where the protected PDF document will be saved.
Step 3 – press the large "Start Now!" button and wait for the source PDF to be processed.
The official PDF Anti-Copy website doesn’t say how this application copy-protects PDFs. It highlights the fact that copying and converting a protected PDF won’t work, but it doesn’t explain how such a thing is achieved. An explanation is provided by Ghacks founder Martin Brinkham: PDF Anti-Copy replaces the source content with a vector image. The protected PDF looks the same as the source, but since the text has been replaced with an image, the copy function no longer works.
Because PDF Anti-Copy replaces the source content with a vector image, the protected PDF will be a lot larger than the source PDF. During my tests, a 133KB document ended up as a 15.4MB document - and that’s a considerable increase.
Let’s get back to your friend Bob, because there’s one more thing I want to mention. Since the protected PDF can be opened and read, Bob could manually copy it. Or better yet, he could use OCR software to extract text from the protected PDF
