An administrator needs to exclude users from rendering reports as PDF output.

By default, all users have permissions for the following capabilities:

Generate CSV Output

Generate PDF Output

Generate XLS Output

Generate XML Output

These separately secured functions support the management of system resources. To control the formats options that users can see and run in the user interface, set access permissions for these capabilities.

References: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSEP7J_11.0.0/com.ibm.swg.ba.cognos.ug_cra.doc/c_specifyreportformat.html