[pdftex] pdftex-pdfcrypt update

[Hans Hagen]

At 08:55 AM 3/29/01 -0500, Mark A. Wicks wrote:
>
>On Thu, 29 Mar 2001, [iso-8859-1] Martin Schröder wrote:
>
>> While it's nice to be able to produce _en_crypted pdfs (which
>> will trouble your printing house), it would be equally nice to be
>> able to _de_crypt included pdfs, i.e. include encrypted pdfs
>> (where the only protection is the "changes not allowed" bit) in a
>> pdf where the resulting file would not be encrypted.
>
>    I hope that authors of PDF tools will respect the integrity of
>encrypted PDFs.  Don't you think that pasting a piece of a document or
>defeating the encryption on a document would be considered to be a
>"change"?  The original author of the document (the person who owns the
>copyright) chose to encrypt to protect it. That protection should be
>respected and not removed or bypassed.  The method of document protection
>described in the PDF specification *requires* that authors of PDF tools
>respect the flags in the document such as "not printable" and "not
>modifiable".  After all, if these flags are easy to defeat, what's the
>point of encrypting your own documents?
 
In that case, the flags alone would have been enough, since any additional
scrambling somehow violates the document and makes it less portable. [I can
imagine that some archeologist wants to read the pdf of rosette some day in
the future and hacking passwords is no fun then]

Hans 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                  Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE | pragma at wxs.nl
                      Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
 tel: +31 (0)38 477 53 69 | fax: +31 (0)38 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------