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Álvaro Ramírez
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Álvaro Ramírez

02 June 2022 Emacs: Password-protect current pdf

UPDATE: Check out Password-protect current pdf (revisted) for a simpler version.

Every so often, I need to password-protect a pdf. On macOS, Preview has a simple solution, but I figured there must be a command line utility to make this happen. There are options, but qdf did the job just fine. 

qpdf --verbose --encrypt USER-PASSWORD OWNER-PASSWORD KEY-LENGTH -- input.pdf output.pdf

So what does qpdf have to do with Emacs? Command-line utilities are easy to invoke from Emacs via shell-command (M-!), but I don't want to remember the command nor the parameters. I may as well add a function that does what I mean and password-protect either buffers or dired files. 

(defun pdf-password-protect ()
    "Password protect current pdf in buffer or `dired' file."
    (interactive)
    (unless (executable-find "qpdf")
      (user-error "qpdf not installed"))
    (unless (equal "pdf"
                   (or (when (buffer-file-name)
                         (downcase (file-name-extension (buffer-file-name))))
                       (when (dired-get-filename nil t)
                         (downcase (file-name-extension (dired-get-filename nil t))))))
      (user-error "no pdf to act on"))
    (let* ((user-password (read-passwd "user-password: "))
           (owner-password (read-passwd "owner-password: "))
           (input (or (buffer-file-name)
                      (dired-get-filename nil t)))
           (output (concat (file-name-sans-extension input)
                           "_enc.pdf")))
      (message
       (string-trim
        (shell-command-to-string
         (format "qpdf --verbose --encrypt '%s' '%s' 256 -- '%s' '%s'"
                 user-password owner-password input output))))))