Alfresco PDF Toolkit Demo: Encrypting Documents

This is a quick demo showing the Alfresco PDF Toolkit in action. The PDF Toolkit can do a lot of things with PDFs. In this case, we're encrypting a PDF and showing how to decrypt it using a password, whether displayed in the browser or in Acrobat.

Created by Nathan McMinn and contributed to by others from around the community, the Alfresco PDF Toolkit works with both Community Edition and Enterprise Edition and is freely available under the GPL from GitHub at https://github.com/ntmcminn/alfresco-....

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Closed Caption:

this is a quick demo of encryption of
pdfs using the fresco PDF tool kit that
you can download from github and install
in alfresco
so I'm running a fresco 51 community
edition and i'm just going to grab a PDF
and drop it into my repository here and
this is just a simple PDF that is not
encrypted just as this document is going
to get encrypted and what you can see is
because i have the PDF tool kit
installed
I have some options over here on the
right all sorts of things I can do to a
PDF document courtesy of the PDF toolkit
and in this demo I am just going to
encrypt the PDF document this launch is
a dialogue that asks for a lot of
different options you could obviously
use your own dialogue that just narrow
this down to the options that you care
about
but this is the this is what you get out
of the box so I'll just name this
encrypted and i'm going to copy it into
the same folder that I'm already sitting
in but name is something different so
that i have both the unencrypted and
encrypted version you could do
encryption in place and then you
wouldn't have the encrypted version
available that would just be the
encrypted version then all signed a
password and there are two passwords you
assign one is called a user password the
other one is an owner password
depending on which password you use to
decrypt the PDF is going to dictate what
you're allowed to do to that PDF so if
you use the user password
you're going to be able to read the PDF
if you use the owner password you'll be
able to make any kind of changes
obviously you would want to use
passwords here that are
it difficult to guess but in this demo
I'm just going to use these going to set
the encryption level and then click ok
now if I look back in my folder
here's the encrypted PDF
now if I open up the encrypted PDF now
because this is encrypted
alfresco can't read it and therefore
can't produce a preview of the document
also it can't use it in full text search
so that's a you know an obvious drawback
to correcting your PDFs that are stored
in alfresco if i try to view this in the
browser it will prompt me for a password
so i can specify either the user
password or the owner password and now
we can unencrypted and view the document
similarly if I download this document
and then try to open it outside of the
browser using acrobat the
I'll get prompted for a password and
then the document gets decrypted and
shown to me and adobe acrobat
you can also use the decrypt PDF
document if you wanted to decrypt a
document and then stored in the
repository
also you could write a rule so that when
you add a PDF to folder that PDF
automatically gets encrypted so all of
this is available by using the PDF
toolkit project and that's available on
github so thanks Nathan McMahon the
creator of the toolkit for making this
available
it's pretty cool i've used it on
multiple projects and feel free to
suggest improvements and submit pull
requests and participate in the project