Forum Discussion
Is it possible to restrict download and print of PDF files in SharePoint online?
Already tried. it does not work. I am not sure if the people that give these suggestions out in the forums above (not you, the links) actually test their advice. I created a custom permission level and spent 3 hours individually trying different combinations of permissions. Again, microsoft stated this is a known issue due to the fact that PDFs and other files have no server-side file handlers. There is no way to do this and actually limit downloading. You can limit downloading for word files all day. but not for what I need which is PDFs. Thank you for your suggestions however.
And I have found, if you prevent the ability to download a PDfF you can still print it, which circumvents the download restriction as you can print it to another PDF etc etc.
Turning on Information Rights Management does stop the ability to print the PDF, but then you can not read it in the browser as someone else has pointed out above.
Office documents are fine, but PDF docs are a real issue, as people use PDF now for lots of valid reasons.
- Major miss by Microsoft on this. Stop catering to only Office type documents. We just had to use DropBox (blech!) to accomplish this.
thayes2021 We have a restricted/limited site for a certain type of user and every file is a PDF file.
This is still an issue in 2023, no built in way to view PDF files even though modern browsers would support it.
