On Sun, Mar 11, 2001 at 11:07:56AM -0500, Chris Danis wrote: > I certainly agree here. Enforcing them is futile. But perhaps as a > matter of courtesy (not only to the authors of the PDF documents in > question, but also to the xpdf author, who seems to have a totally > opposite viewpoint to what is being presented here and will probably > complain a bit), we should modify the patch so that while the copy > controls are still disabled, it notifies the user (a messagebox seems > appropriate) upon loading the PDF about what kind of access controls are > enabled? (e.g. "This PDF file has bits set to disallow copying of the > text," and perhaps an optional "Please follow fair use restrictions") I tend to agree, though I might do it differently.. I'd probably respect the author's wishes to have it not allow these things by default, with an override switch which displays such a message in interactive modes. Any such message would be pointless for the text interface, but a line to stderr telling you that the pdf has set the don't-allow bit for what you're doing, but that it's being done anyway, is sufficient. In this way, the command line tools require you to actually choose to bypass the copy-protection bits in the file and the graphical tools can do so as well, but both at least tell you that the author of the file wanted you to not be able to do these things. This is good because by default xpdf and friends will behave as pdf authors would intend (for good or for ill..) The xpdf author's intent that users police themselves is satisfied even if the method changes. The end user's need to sometimes do things the pdf's author might not want for whatever reason (fair use or otherwise) is satisfied. Also, my desire to know who doesn't think I should be able to do what is also satisfied. =) Just a comment from the peanut gallery. -- Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Free software developer <Shinobi> There are worse things than Perl....ASP comes to mind
Attachment:
pgpukEXbYiYmr.pgp
Description: PGP signature