Many things

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Sun Jan 30 16:01:20 2005

On Sun, 2005-01-30 at 14:44 -0600, Jim Leonard wrote:
> der Mouse wrote:
> >>I recently wanted to send something to someone relating to a
> >>non-computer related project I'm working on, and due to what it is, I
> >>don't want anyone being able to modify the file, but I don't mind
> >>them printing it out, I was able to do this with PDF.
> >
> > Sorry to burst your bubble, but you weren't. All you were able to do
> > is make it a bit harder. (If it can be printed, it can be captured and
> > modified - at least until they get DRM pushed into printers, and given
> > the installed base, that won't be a for a while yet.)
>
> Well, where do you stop? DRM in video cards so that you can't take a screen
> capture? DRM in monitors so that the picture blanks out when you turn your
> head? DRM in the human optic nerve? I mean, come on.

Uh huh - DRM in the brain. I mean, look at the way countries are jumping
on the compulsory biometric passport / ID card thing everywhere these
days.

Soon after that it'll be biometric cards with RFID chips in, then
compulsory RFID implants, and soon after that it'll be possible just to
zap someone if they're sitting in front of a piece of technology doing
something that they're not supposed to

;-)


Back to the PDF problem, I still don't follow the *why*. Sure, modern
PCs generally have Acrobat reader installed. But even more machines than
that can read postscript, and even more than that still can handle a
bunch of TIFF images (I'm talking about scanned image data here of
course, not plain text).

Why would someone want to limit the audience who can view their data?
And if someone receives a bunch of images and is desperate for PDF, then
they obviously have a machine capable of handling PDF, and therefore
running the various free tools that'll create PDF files from images.

Going from images to PDF on a machine capable of viewing PDF is easy.
Doing the opposite and going from PDF to images on a machine that's not
capable of viewing PDF is so much harder. Given that you're representing
the same data at the end of the day, surely it's a no-brainer?

I'm not anti-PDF at all; in some situations it's very useful (much
better than a Word doc, say) - but for scanned pages relating to classic
hardware it seems the wrong choice.
Received on Sun Jan 30 2005 - 16:01:20 GMT