Drew Jensen wrote: > I suppose what you are asking about is the ability in MS Office to set > two levels of security, the first lets you control who can actually read > the document. If you stop there anyone that can read it can modify it. > Then MS Office supports a modify password. Using this then you can not > only limit who can read the file, but who can modify it. ie. Controlled > Read-Only files enforced by the office suite.
You can't enforce "read only" behavior in an open file format. If somebody wanted to change your file he just can do it on the level of the xml streams inside the package. So such a feature is pointless. It is even pointless in closed formats: you could copy the content of the file to another one that is not write protected, change the file and pass it along instead of the old one. Nobody will be able to see the difference if you are doing it sufficiently clever. OOo offers two other ways to deal with that: - encryption: only users knowing the password can open the file; - digital signing: this will not prevent others from editing the file but everybody who will change the file will break the signature and so it is visible to everyone whether a file they get has been changed or not. This is better than the pseudo-"security" feature of a readonly mode. Ciao, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
