I am getting nowhere on the Adobe forums, so maybe someone in the Sitepoint community can help!
On one of my client sites we need a passworded pdf document. For several years all worked well. Since moving from Acrobat 8 to 9, the passworded pdf file will not open once it is downloaded from the server. My file was created as an .xls file in openoffice, then converted to pdf. Password security was then set in Acrobat 9 pro (mac). The problem only occurs AFTER uploading to the server; it works as it should on my computer before that. It also opens fine on download when it is not secured with a password, but that means it does not have the security needed. Has anyone else run into this? Is there something I can do to regain the security functionality?
I’d double-check that it is being both uploaded and downloaded in Binary, I assume it just has the Standard password settings that isn’t tied to a specific machine, etc.
Well, another way might be to zip the file and see what happens. If that works once it [zip] has been ‘uploaded’ and ‘downloaded’ then you know the funny business is probably occurring via the Servers.
My ftp client is set to ‘auto’ for file types so I’m sure it ‘knows’ to upload it as binary. The file was happily passworded for several years before the latest upgrade from acrobat 8 to 9 (when I moved from CS3 to CS4).
I’d hound Adobe some more if I were you… There is no need to mark the thread as solved somebody else might think of another good solution.
Usually if you just reply and say something on the lines of; “thanks that worked” or “problem sorted” that’s enough. 
I don’t know how to change the forum icon to show problem solved!
Thanks very much. I didn’t know about robots.txt. I’ve just done one which will hopefully solve a lot of problems!
I’d still really like to know what happened in the acrobat upgrade that changed pdf behavior though! (and ways around it for the future).
Assuming you are insisting on using a PDF, visible directly via a standard hyperlink or embedding and not requiring an additional step like clinking a button to download. For Legitimate Search Engines you could try things like robots.txt files to try stop them indexing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard the file.
Though if the robot doesn’t follow those rules, or has malicious intent it may well attempt to retrieve the document.
Thanks xhtmicoder. I just manually uploaded it in binary, just to be double-sure, and got same result. The site is hosted by someone I know who has been all over this and can’t find a cause. He thinks it’s to do with Adobe’s changes when they launched Acrobat 9. It worked fine when it was a pdf made in Acrobat 8.
The reason for passwording it is that it is a membership roster and google was picking up people’s personal addresses and telephone numbers. Is there ANOTHER way to keep it from search engines without passwording it?
Are you sure you are uploading iit the right way (as binary and not text)