I have been doing some work with your com settings to print Word documents to PDF using PDFCreator. All has gone well until yesterday when I noticed that if I set the pdf save format to PDF1A (not tested but perhaps PDF1A and PDFX as well) vice simply PDF then any security settings I apply are simply ignored. E.g., if I set the option not to allow printing then I would expect that the pdf created couldn’t be printed. Unfortunately it can be printed!!
Thinking it could be an issue with my code, I printed directly from your interface with the same settings and there also the security features I set were ignored.
Is this a bug, or by design. I am not that familiar with pdf formats, however, if this is by design (that PDFA1 can’t have security features) then your software provides a false sense of security by showing the ability to set those features.
thanks for the feedback.
The basic thing first: PDF/A doesn’t allow encryption. Previous versions of PDFCreator did allow encrypting PDF/A, even though this basically created an invalid PDF/A. But I agree there should be a warning if you have security enabled in your profile and then select PDF/A as output format.
The security settings generally create a false sense of security by the way, unless you encrypt the PDF with a password for opening. All restrictions like disable printing/copying/editing only set flags which the viewing application can handle as it likes, but this fact is hardly communicated at all. We will discuss this issue in our team.