https://jeltsch.org/en/tags/password-protection/Recent content in Password-Protection on Michael’s DomainHugoen-usCopyright © 2002 - 2026 Michael Jeltsch.Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:18:18 +0300https://jeltsch.org/en/ps2pdf_versus_pstill_and_password_protection_of_pdf_documents/Wed, 23 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000https://jeltsch.org/en/ps2pdf_versus_pstill_and_password_protection_of_pdf_documents/<p>While reading about ps2pdf (which is just a commandline front-end to ghostscript), I realized that despite its simple appearance, ps2pdf has almost all capabilities of Acrobat 5. ps2pdf14 outputs Acrobat 5-compatible files. According to the documentation strong password protection should be possible, however, I never managed with that.In theory the following commands should work:<code>-sOwnerPassword= and -sUserPassword=</code>In order to set the key length to 128 you have to use<code>ps2pdf14 -dEncryptionR=3 -dKeylength=128</code>Another thing that I don&rsquo;t know how to handle easily with ps2pdf is the cropping of documents.For the password protection, a very good alternative seems to be PStill ( <a href="http://www.pstill.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">http://www.pstill.com/&nbsp; <svg class="svg-inline--fa fas fa-up-right-from-square fa-2xs" fill="currentColor" aria-hidden="true" role="img" viewBox="0 0 512 512" overflow="visible"><use href="#fas-up-right-from-square"></use></svg></a> ). The command:<code>pstill -Muserpassword=testpassword testfile.ps</code>does the trick.</p>