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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Nice work if you can get it 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • That means that Acrobat Reader, xpdf, an so on, won't let me cut and paste anything from it, or save it as a text or as a postscript file, or whatever. AAARGH. Unbelievable cluelessness from the guys who designed this brain-dead PDF "feature", and from the guys who USE IT.

    xpdf is GPL. You have the source available, and the ability to work round this. However, I should note that the author of xpdf prefers that you "write the author of the document" [foolabs.com] in preference to brute force cracking. What you describe

    • The author of the document doesn't want to make the document available as an alternative format. (You know, that's an official document, officially registered, paperwork, stampage, etc.) I guess they've locked out (or think they've locked out) all means to produce or distribute a modified document. Which would have been better achieved by providing a checksum on a publicly available server, and a built-in way to check against it. Or something.

      For the printing part : I'm not allowed to print it to a PS file,

      • Which would have been better achieved by providing a checksum on a publicly available server, and a built-in way to check against it. Or something.

        Presumably they'd have incurred much less wrath if they'd made a second, cut&paste-able document with the tables, constants, etc that every programmer is going to need from it? (Although the paranoia that makes them worry about modified versions would then prevent this being released, given that they don't seem to be ready to checksum or sign things)

        For the printing part

        So the lock out is as daft as I thought it was - you are forbidden from creating a PostScript file directly, but if your "printer" prints to a disk drive rather than paper you can get one. And if you run it back through ps2pdf?

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