Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.

All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

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

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More | Login | Reply
Loading... please wait.
  • 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 for this document does sound like short-sighted stupidity on the part of the author.

    Does the PDF "feature" let the author lock out printing independantly from save as postscript?

    • 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 t

Stories, comments, journals, and other submissions on use Perl; are Copyright 1998-2006, their respective owners.