Compatibility bug when securing PDFs?

Question

We have upgraded to Acrobat Pro 9 on a Windows XP SP3 platform. We need to make our PDFs compatible for opening with Acrobat 5, so have revised our default compatibility settings to 1.4 (Acrobat 5.x). But as soon as we put security on them (using the same security settings as we've used for years), the compatibility automatically changes to 1.6 (Acrobat 7.x). This is despite the fact we are selecting the 1.4 (Acrobat 5.x) compatibility setting within the Security dialog box. Our client base, many of the government clients, cannot immediately upgrade their reader due to their workplace environment restrictions, so we have alot of unhappy clients. Any advice or workaround welcome!
Thanks in advance,
Andrea

Answer 1

The way to achieve what you want is to set the security to be compatible with "Acrobat 5 or later" and then use PDF optimizer to save for Acrobat 5 or later. You can do these steps by hand or in a batch sequence. If you are going to do it for a number of files, a batch sequence will make it less tedious.