Permissions

PDF document is in read only mode, if opened with Acrobat reader. If you wish to edit the document, then special software is required to edit the contents. Additionally, if you desire that your users should not be able to print the contents nor should be able to extract the contents, you should enable permissions on the document.

PDFBox provides convenient API to achieve above mentioned requirement - AccessPermission.

AccessPermission permission = new AccessPermission();
permission.setCanPrint(false);
permission.setCanExtractContent(false);

StandardProtectionPolicy policy = new StandardProtectionPolicy("", "", permission);
pdDoc.protect(policy);

Above code doesn’t grant Print or content extraction permissions to users. The permissions are configured using StandardProtectionPolicy. Note that first two arguments are passed with blank string argument. This indicates that PDF is not password protected and anyone can view the contents but cannot print or extract it.