PDF file format is the first choice today for scanned documents that needs to be stored or transferred electronically. Even the printers we buy today have in-built support for the PDF files. We can attach a memory card or USB pendrive carrying PDF files to the printer and the printer can readily use these PDF files for printing. Similarly, when we press the “Scan” button to scan our documents, they are usually saved in the PDF file format on our computers.
But if you have decided to scan some of your private or sensitive documents and save them on your computer, you should encrypt them first. Encryption of PDF files ensures that not just anybody can double-click on them and view their contents. We can encrypt PDF files easily using the free PDFEncrypt utility.
PDFEncrypt is available in a portable package as well as in form of an installer. In both cases, it shows up in a small window in which we have to select the source PDF file, output PDF file, and enter a password. We can also make it generate a very strong password which is also copied to the clipboard for safekeeping. At this point, we can click on the Encrypt button to start the encryption.
In the settings for the PDFEncrypt tool we can choose the various permissions given for anyone who is opening the encrypted PDF file, the algorithm being used for encryption (such as AES-256, AES-128, RC4-128, RC4-40) etc. We can also set PDFEncrypt to run a command or program after the encryption has been completed.
PDFEncrypt uses the encryption features specified in the official PDF file format specifications. This means that the PDF files encrypted by PDFEncrypt can be safely opened and viewed by any of the modern PDF viewer applications such as Adobe Acrobat Reader, Foxit PDF Reader, PDF X-Change Viewer, and many more.
You can download PDFEncrypt from https://pdfencrypt.net/.