Limit How Many Times a PDF File Can Be Printed

When you protect a PDF document with our DRM technology, printing is also disabled by default. There are, however, some instances when you would like to allow the document end-user to print some copies of the file.

Follow the steps below to achieve this using All-About-PDF's (digital rights management) DRM technology.

If you haven't already, make sure you are using the latest version of All-About-PDF from our website as well as the latest PDFe Reader (at least build 1072).

Open All-About-PDF from the Windows Start menu and then hit the "Apply DRM" button.

On the screen that opens, select the PDF document that you would like to protect with DRM and then, If desired, set the document's expiry date by expanding the "Set your PDF to expire" section.

Under the "Allow Printing of PDF files" section, you can check the "Allow printing of protected file" checkbox and then specify how many times your end-user is allowed to print the file.

Hit the "Apply DRM" button to protect your file; the resulting DRM protected file is saved in the same location as the PDF file with a ".pdfe" extension.

All-About-PDF’s DRM technology automatically prevents the documents from being printed to PDF and document printers as well as prevents screen capture of the document.

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:

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.

Free PDFe Reader Now Available for iPhone and iPad

We are happy to announce the general availability of our free PDFe Reader for iPhone and iPad. You and your users can now open and read the DRM protected PDF files on the go and on your tablets!

p/s You can add expiry dates to your PDF documents using All-About-PDF for Windows. See this link for more information.

Download from the Apple App Store using the link below

Or simply scan this QR code.