[pdftex] Adding security pw to pdftex

[Ricardo Sanchez Carmenes]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Karsten Tinnefeld wrote:

> > How difficult would be to add security password to pdf files
> > generated by pdftex ? This feature would be very useful.
> 
> To create encrypted pdf, you need to license the rc4 algorithm from RSA 
> Inc.  You can produce an identical file by using publically available 
> software that implements the algorithm, but this is by definition not 
> encrypted pdf, as RSA refuses to accept that the public algorithm does 
> the same as rc4 and adobe has specified it using their property.

If I am not missing anything, as far as the result is the same, and
copyrights are no broken, why not using the public software for this
purpose ? The interest here would be to have compatible encription
implemented, not to reach official certification from the RSA, isn't it?
 
> Check
> 	http://www.ozemail.com.au/~geoffk/pdfencrypt/
> 	http://www.ncat.edu/~grogans/algorithm_history_and_descriptio.htm
> 	http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/technotes/acrobatpdf.html
> for more information.

Thanks, I'll have a look. I haven't read anything about encription
issues for the last 3--4 years, so I am certainly outdated.

> > There is a package (htmldoc from Easy software), distributed
> > in source under the GPL, that transforms html documents directly
> > to pdf, and that has this ability implemented. This means that
> > it shouldn't be too difficult to implement in pdftex as well
> > without infringing copyrights (unless htmldoc is already doing so).
> 
> Why didn't you just point us to http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/ ?

Because I did not have the exact url with me. But it was no so difficult
to find ... or was it ?

Regards, Ricardo.