The biggest advantage of a PDF file is of course the ease with which information can be shared. There is no need for installing any expensive software or having to worry if you will be able to view the document on your platform. The free Adobe Reader can be downloaded and installed in a matter of minutes, and best of all, it is free. You can now ensure that your documents appear in the professional format you had intended them to be without fear of them being distorted on various other computers and you can find powerful tools to easily recover damaged PDF files. Also, by making your content open and accessible, you are allowing search engines to index the content, which can help drive traffic to your website.
On the other hand, it is quite possible that you never quite intended for your PDF file to be accessible to all viewers and for content to be copied so easily. You might wish that there was some way in which you could allow only certain people to view the document and only certain others to be able to view, copy and print it. One of the most effective ways of doing this is by password protecting your PDF file. Further, if your PDF file were to get corrupted for some reason, you may end up losing all your valuable information. Having a PDF recovery tool to recover data from a damaged PDF file is very essential to protecting crucial information stored in PDF files.
By placing user restrictions ' restricting access of certain users ' you are ensuring that most users can only read the document. You could use the same method to allow some users to be able to print the document as also select the content, copy and paste it in order to be used in other applications. If the document is opened in a PDF editing application, the users can also edit the document if they have the necessary permissions. This is a very powerful way of protecting your PDF file.