I run a site for a newsletter that has approximately 3500 members. My site has a member's section that is secure and the ability to disallow access to pages based on whether or not they are logged-in. With this in mind, does anyone here know of a good way to offer secured PDF's of our newsletter online?

I know that once you put something online its no longer 100% secure, but I would like to make it as difficult to steal/redistribute as possible. Some things I would like to prevent is easily downloading and printing.

I appreciate any and all help, and am eagerly awaiting your insight.

Sincerely,

Jordan Coffey

Acrobat does have some security features and I believe it will disallow printing if you set it that way. You can also require a password.

If you've got the directories secured based in their membership login, why not secure the pdf's the same way ?

Acrobat's security settings are circumvented fairly easily if another PDF-viewing program is used. I use PHP to secure my pages, and although I can control access to the pages, I can't directly control access to the the PDFs themselves.

I currently use a database, php, and a recurring cron job to continually change the foldername that the files are stored in to prevent people from directly linking to the files but it still fails to keep them from viewing the files with a third-party PDF viewer that fails to adhere to Acrobat's security settings.

Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate any and all help.

Jordan