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It's not clear what you're asking... but let me see if I understand you: You have a PDF that is printed and then redistilled. That redistilled PDF is not secured, and you want to know how to keep the security. You can't. Once they've got postscript of your PDF, you've lost. But there are a couple things you can do. 1) Prevent printing. Allowing printing is a gaping hole in true security. This is a simple matter of a security flag in the standard security handler. 2) Store important data such that it is not printable. Annotations have flags governing their appearance in the printed version. At that point, you may as well not allow printing at all. There may be some strange PS-in-the-PDF trickery you could do to tell distiller to recreate the PDF with a given password, but that is trivial to defeat (alter the PS before distilling). PDF allows you to store arbitrary PS that is not executed by the viewer, just passed on for printing. You can build some PDF structures in PS. I don't know if you can control distiller's output settings in this way, but it's worth looking into. Note that it may not be possible to make this technique "recursive"... converting the redistilled PDF to PS and to PDF again would defeat this tactice (without some PS wizardry) --Mark Storer Software Engineer Cardiff Software #include <disclaimer> typdef std::disclaimer<Cardiff> Discard; To change your subscription: http://www.pdfzone.com/discussions/lists-pdfdev.html
