pdf expiry

How To Set a PDF To Expire Days After Being Opened

As useful as setting an expiry date on a PDF is, sometimes you just don’t know if the person you are sending the PDF to will have a chance to review the document in time. This is especially true for course materials where it is useful to protect the documents with an expiry date but the actual courses may have multiple student intakes with varying starting dates. It can be useful to set the PDF to expire so many days after the student opens the course material; the course duration for example.

In All-About-PDF, you can set a PDF’s expiry date to be relative to when the document is first opened. This is achieved using our ground-breaking digital rights management (DRM) technology.

Let’s look at an example of how to set a PDF file to expire 365 days after being opened. Follow the steps below:

Setting a PDF's Relative Expiry Date


  1. Download and open All-About-PDF

  2. Click on the SET EXPIRY button

  3. Click the “…” button and select the PDF file you would like to process

  4. Select the Use All-About-PDF DRM option

  5. Select the Expire X days after first viewing and set the number of days to 365

  6. Check the box for Use internet time… so that the document expiry cannot be bypassed by changing the user’s system date

  7. Provide a custom message for when the PDF expires.

  8. Hit the GO button and apply the settings to the PDF. The document will be saved with a PDFE extension in the same folder as the original file.

To get started with protecting your PDF documents with a relative expiry date, download All-About-PDF today.



DRM Protected PDFe Files

What is Digital Rights Management (DRM) Protection

Digital Rights Management is a far-reaching term that refers to any scheme that controls access to copyrighted material using technological means. In essence, DRM removes usage control from the person in possession of digital content and puts it in the hands of the copyright owner.

What are PDFe Files?

All-About-PDF’s PDFe files are encrypted PDF documents that have an expiry date. They allow the document author to specify when the PDF document is no longer valid. In the near future, these documents will include more features such as geolocation lock (where a document can only be viewed in specific regions), domain lock (the document can only be viewed by users of a specific Windows domains) and remote kill-switch ability (the document author can remote render the document invalid).

These features are very useful for authors of valuable intellectual property such as online course materials, engineering designs, architecture drawings etc. This allows the authors to share their copyrighted material while maintaining full access control to their intellectual property.

In order to maintain high security, the PDFe file specification is proprietary to All-About-PDF and can only be opened by our special document readers.

How To Open AND VIEW PDFE Files

iOS and iPadOS PDFe Viewer

iOS and iPadOS PDFe Viewer

Once a PDFe file has been created in All-About-PDF, there are three ways of opening and viewing it.

  1. Using the free PDFe Viewer for Windows: you can be download this from our downloads page

  2. Using the free PDFe Viewer for macOS: you can download this from our downloads page

  3. Using the free iOS and iPad app: this can be downloaded from the Apple Apple Store

  4. Using our free online PDFe viewer: you may access the online PDFe Viewer using Chrome web browser at this address.


All of the above methods of viewing PDFe documents do not allow saving or printing of the original PDF document.