Smallpdf has Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract text from PDF files back into an editable format. If you’re happy with the file in JPG format, you can skip the last step and download the file instead of clicking “Export As.” Either way, the new document will be read-only by the time you save it. Locking your PDF is very useful when you want to share classified information that can’t be manipulated by other people or if you want to make sure no one can claim your creative work as their own. The result is a PDF with content that can’t be copied or edited. In the next step, we turn this image back into a PDF.

To explain what happened there, we first take your PDF and convert it into an image file-a non-editable, truly read-only JPEG.