URGENT! How to hide/eliminate the date created/modified from pdf file (Acrobat 6.0)

This is not possible. The creation and modification time stamps are in the document's "Info" dictionary, and all encryption you can apply to a file will only hide this information as long as the document is not opened in Acrobat. Once Acrobat (or any other PDF processor that can process encrypted PDF documents) opens the file, all the information is decrypted, and therefore made available.

What you can do is modify this information before you encrypt the file. This would allow you to change the created date, but not the modified date. You would use a tool like the Enfocus Browser for this (http://www.enfocus.com/support/knowledgeBase/browser.php). However, this is a very dangerous process: You are working "in the guts" of your PDF file, and it's really easy to corrupt the whole file. You would however still not be able to change the modification date (this would still be the date and time you write out the encrypted file).

You could probably modify the modification date within an Acrobat plug-in, but this is a solution that would require quite a bit of work (or money).

On the enfocus webpage it says:

"Modifying a PDF file with Enfocus Browser 2 can easily damage the file beyond repair, resulting in data loss, crashing applications and worse. Enfocus takes absolutely no responsibility for any consequences. Use Browser's low level editing features only if you are a software developer or an expert user in a development environment, and use them with extreme care even then."

Do you have any ideas about what they mean by..."and worse..."? I'm not an expert by any means, I'm really a newbie. When I first read your post I thought I would just create a copy of the original file, and try to modify that, so that if any problems occur then I would still have the orig. uncorrupted. But..this warning on their web sounds quite serious... what would you advise?

Does anyone else have any alternative suggestions?

That's probably something their lawyers wanted :-) The most that can happen is that your PDF file will be corrupt. You need to enable the feature in the prefererences dialog before you can actually modify a PDF file, so you can safely look around and find the data that needs to be modified (it's in the Info dictionary that you see when you open up the browser for a PDF file.

i'm trying to install the enfocus browser...but for some reason will not start up
i tried both the plugin and the full browser..installed separately and together even, restarted comp several times
wondering if i'm tripping over something basic. you mention i need to enable the preferences dialog - this is after i have the enfocus working correctly, presumably?

Yes, either as the standalone application, or as plug-in. I'm using both on a PC (Win2K) and Mac OS X (here only the standalone app, they don't have a plug-in for the Mac).

Do you get any error messages?

error message:
"BrowserApp.exe - Unable to Locate Component
This application has failed to start because CSFTPL32.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem."

any ideas?

Here is some information about a different Enfocus product that also requires to manually install this library (there is a download link on this page):

http://www.enfocus.com/support/knowledgeBase/showarticle.php?kbnr=111

Ya Thanks! That worked! Now I'm in there, and I see the info dictionary (going to the "browse current document" or "browse current path"), and i have the creation date before me but I don't see any way to modify it? You mention i have to enable this somehow in the preferences dialog? Can you explain more details on how?