On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:27:59 +0000 Mike <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> dijo: > I don't know enough about PDF to help but, if your guess is right, there > must be something in the file to allow it to be edited and saved. It > could take a lot of searching to find it though.
Here's the deal. Adobe owns the PDF standard, although they publish it and allow others to use it. From time to time over the years they have published new versions. One of the recent changes was to allow the creation of editable "form" PDFs. The major push for this came from corporate and government customers. For example, the US Internal Revenue Service wanted to put tax forms on the web so people could fill them out with their computers and mail them in. Now, the vast majority of such customers were creating their PDFs with the full Adobe Acrobat product. So starting with Acrobat 7.0 Adobe added the ability to create editable PDFs (although only in the Pro version). In approximately the same time frame OOo added the ability to create editable PDFs (only partially, because you can't set the font for a control as you can with the full Acrobat Pro). And when Adobe released Acrobat Pro version 8.0 and Reader 8.1 they included the ability to allow the user to not only edit the form and print it, but to save the edited form to the users hard disk so it could be e-mailed back. OOo cannot yet do this (although there are workarounds that have been mentioned in this thread, e.g., Foxit, CUPS printer driver for PDF, print to PostScript then distill to PDF with ps2pdf, among others.) As with all options when creating a PDF, the creator must specify permissions for the various things the user will be able to do. For example, you can create a PDF and not even allow printing or copying to the clipboard. All the permission options are available in the full Acrobat Pro product from Adobe. Other programs that can create PDFs (OOo, Scribus, MS Office 2007) may not implement all features. Bear in mind that Adobe makes buckets of money from the sale of corporate and organization licenses for Acrobat Pro. They are not as bad as Microsoft when it comes to screwing open source software, but they sure want to maintain a competitive edge. They are also religious about protecting digital rights of the creators of forms. I assume the OOo developers are working on adding features to the PDF export options in OOo, but they will always be playing catch-up to Adobe. Remember, Adobe owns the PDF standard. They can change it any time if it suits their bottom line to do so. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
