On Apr 26, 2008, at 7:30 AM, Marc Espie wrote:
If anything, our xpdf should probably display a notice that says
`the author of the document thought you should not be able to print
it... or whatever'.
I didn't mean to get into this discussion because it really doesn't
concern me at all. Whatever the port maintainer decides I'm fine with
it.
However, I agree with this comment above from Marc Espie.
I am "guilty" of using "DRM in PDF" in the past.
Here's my use case. I used to teach at the university.
My slides usually had figures with animations in it, resulting in
multiple pages for each step of animation.
If a student presses a print button in a public lab they may pay a lot
of money for 200 pages of slides in huge letters and page-by-page
"animation".
To prevent an unnecessary expense to a student, I always switched ON
"do not allow printing" in PDFs of these lecture slides. I also
always posted a 4 up version of the slides with *no* protection -- 4
slides per page with animations turned into a final picture after the
last step.
Students than could print 10 to 20 pages of this document as opposed
to 200. They could also watch original slides on screen if they
needed to see steps in the particular figure for better understanding
of a process.
I also alway explained to students in class why there are two copies
of the same slides and why is only one of them printable.
So, in my opinion this "DRM" has its use cases.
Replacing a protection with a message of intent of the author is
probably a good idea.
