Russ Allbery dijo [Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 02:14:21PM -0700]: > I think people are not understanding why users use this feature in some > environments. > > Yes, sometimes it's a misguided attempt at DRM, but I've more often seen > it inside a workplace as defense in depth against *mistakes*. One might, > for instance, mark a document as not printable because it contains social > security numbers and salary information and it's corporate policy not to > create hard copies of the document beause of the risk of exposure of > personal information that might put the company at legal risk. > > That's not to say that Debian PDF viewers should support this the way that > Acrobat does, but for that use case, the desired UI is probably something > like a dialog box that pops up and says that the document author has > marked this PDF as not printable and asking the user if they're sure they > want to override. For this use case, such a warning would probably serve > the same purpose.
The reasons not to want a document printed are quite easy to understand, but the mechanism is flawed. Given the setting you mention, you can just slap a red banner stating "Confidential, do not print". If it is on a corporate setting, just state it as a policy - and if somebody fails to comply with the policy, there should be sanctions. Of course, somebody interested in printing the file will do it. Either by his own means or, like my users, by mailing the "techie" the document asking him to unprotect it. Or by sticking it on a USB key and taking it off-site to a location they can freely tinker with. As I said on my previous mail: If you don't want it to be printed, distribute in a way that makes it hard to be useful when printed. Don't you trust somebody with social security numbers and salary information? Don't give it to them. -- Gunnar Wolf • gw...@gwolf.org • (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100419230530.gg29...@gwolf.org
