John Jason Jordan wrote the following on 27/06/2008 18:28:
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.
Thank you for the clarification. It is a bit as expected, and as I've written before 'In a way, I
can understand them', but Adobe will have to watch out for newer standards (e.g. XPS) and other
software houses. I think it will be only in their advantage 'to keep ahead in their software' by
supplying the best packages, not by limiting the possibilities.
Regards,
Pieter
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