PDF Anti-copy Review

We often talk about software to create, merge or edit PDFs. What can you do when it comes to protecting PDFs from text edits and copies? There is specific software for that. PDF Anti-Copy is an interesting one: it’s an incredibly simple solution, but one that does what it promises. It manages to prevent you can copy or modify the text. PDF unlocking or restriction removing programs can do nothing on PDF Anti-copy converted files.

In order to protect PDFs, in fact, this software boasts Ghostscript and dNoOutputFonts technologies. They replace text pages with vector images, preserving the document quality which continues to look like an ordinary PDF, but it will obviously be heavier than normal.

First impression

PDF Anti-copy seems very simple to use; it’s also a portable software so you can use it wherever you need it simply by putting it on a memory stick. The user interface is simple, clear, and sports recognizable icons.

Features

You can upload a PDF by clicking on the Upload icon: now the software shows a list of all the pages in the document and a preview of the selected page. A zoom of a selected document allows you to see a preview of its content: this feature is very useful when the text is tiny. Now it’s possible to apply for the PDF protection on a single page or entire document with just a click of the Start button. The process takes a few moments, especially if you have decided to protect the whole document, so be patient. A bar will show you the conversion percentage.

At the end of the conversion, the destination folder where the file is located will automatically open, and the “_AntiCopy” extension will be added to distinguish the file. If you try to copy and paste text now, you won’t be able. Instead, if you try to convert it to Word, Excel or TXT to edit it, you’ll only get a blank document. Of course, the block is not impossible to circumvent: the protected text can always be copied by hand or can be printed and retrieved with free OCR software, but PDF Anti-copy can still discourage the less experienced users.

Of course, protected PDFs will weigh more, as we mentioned, because they go from text to vector images with a decent size. Also, internal document search will no longer work.

PDF Anti-copy works on Windows XP, Windows Vista (32 bit), Windows Vista (64 bit), Windows 7 (32 bit), Windows 7 (64 bit), Windows 8, Windows Server, and Windows 10. It’s available in English, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Korean and Dutch.

Pricing

PDF Anti-Copy is completely free. The download takes up only 19 MB, while the extracted file weighs 30MB.