Re: FLOSS support for signed PDFs
On Tue, 2 Oct 2007 11:13:12 -0700
Andrew Sackville-West <andrew@farwestbilliards.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 12:45:58PM -0400, Celejar wrote:
> > On Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:49:13 -0500
> > John Hasler <jhasler@debian.org> wrote:
> >
> > > I wrote:
> > > > How are they doing this detection [of Acroread]?
> > >
> > > Celejar writes:
> > > > I don't know.
> > >
> > > I suggest you concentrate your efforts on finding out (and publish your
> > > results, of course). Once you can spoof their detection method you can get
> > > them to send you the files which you should be able to read despite the
> > > signature. Verifying the signature can come later.
> >
> > I installed the linux tarball (as a non-priveleged user, and to a
> > non-standard location under $HOME, to minimize pollution), and dropped
> > the plugin (nppdf.so) into $HOME/.mozilla/plugins (I'm using IW), which
> > was enough for the website to accept my system as having Acrobat
> > installed. I assume it was the plugin that did it, since I doubt there
> > were any heuristics that could have found the files I installed under
> > $HOME/some_location.
> >
> > Oddly enough, when I try to download PDFs from the institution's site,
> > the plugin doesn't pick them up, although IW recognizes them as "PDF
> > documents", and "about:plugins" shows Acrobat as being installed. [IW
> > only offers to open the PDFs with the default app (Evince) or to save
> > them to disk].
> >
> > pdfinfo gives:
> >
> > > Producer: iText by lowagie.com (r1.02b;p128)
> > > CreationDate: Tue Oct 2 11:39:33 2007
> > > ModDate: Tue Oct 2 11:39:33 2007
> > > Tagged: no
> > > Pages: 4
> > > Encrypted: no
>
> they're not encrypted, so can you open them with evince/xpdf? I'm not
Yes.
> sure what the problem is, I thought you were just trying to cross the
> hurdle of getting them to allow d/l. Or do you need to confirm the
> signatures?
The main hurdle was indeed getting it to just give me the PDFs, but if
they are indeed signed, I'd certainly like to be able to verify
the signatures, and I'm also just curious now as to why the plugin isn't
being called for these PDFs as it is for others.
> A
Celejar
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