[OS X TeX] iTeXMaC and secure documents

[Maarten Sneep]

On 27 Mar 2006, at 20:28, Jason Davies wrote:

> My department wishes to produce secure pdfs (ie not copyable). I am  
> testing a pdf and, though iTeXMac will not allow me to copy  
> material from the original, it will let me save a copy then happily  
> copy via the clipboard.
>
> Is that desirable? Does anyone know how to prevent this happening?  
> The PDF was created in Acrobat Reader 7 on a PC.
>
> I believe this is on-topic but am happy to be instructed otherwise:-)

Acrobat reader will indeed fully honour this request, and print as  
bitmap when printing to a PS printer to avoid capture of the PS  
stream to re-distill. Let me say that I'm very happy that Preview  
doesn't do that, 20 minutes per page for 30 pages isn't fun at all.

I doubt that full ‘protection’ will ever exist. I think that Preview  
will honour the copy-restriction settings, but that should be  
enforced at the framework level, otherwise any application that uses  
these frameworks has te ensure itself that the protection is honoured.

Off topic: the concept of protecting pdf files (and indeed most other  
digital media) is flawed from the start. Password protection may work  
and be useful on occasion*, the rest is annoying, and can very easily  
be circumvented.

Maarten

* When I sent out my thesis for proofreading, I password protected it  
to avoid a fully open file. No other restrictions were applied.------------------------- Info --------------------------
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