Re: Non-Printing PDFs with ConTeXt

[Andreas Schneider <aksdb@gmx.de>]

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On Friday, May 4, 2012, at 12:37 Malte Stien wrote:
> Hi all,

> Is there a way I can get ConTeXt to produce PDFs that are
> not-printable? Just as a background to my question: This is not
> about copyright. Rather, I am using ConTeXt to produce quality
> process documents. The quality management system requires that all
> quality process documents be "controlled", that is one must prevent
> folks from printing copies of their own that then keep floating
> around the place and cannot be retracted when a new version of the
> quality process document is issued.

> Hence, I am aiming for a paper-less scenario where everyone reads
> the documents on screen. Therefore, I would like to make printing
> impossible, or at least hard. The only one who should be able to
> print the document is the Document Manager; maybe the documents
> could be encrypted (PDF supports that, I believe), such that the
> Document Manager can print them knowing the password.

> So far, I have only seen Word and Acrobat Distiller being able to
> do this. Is there a way I can setup ConTeXt to do this? Or are there
> some command line tools, that can do that after the PDF has been produced?

> Any hints would be great.
> Thank you,
> Malte.

You can accomplish PDF encryption with pdftk (for example):
http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

You  use that to restrict certain features (in your case printing) and
protect  that restriction with a password. The PDF itself can still be
read without password.

Of  course  the  PDF viewer has to honor that restriction. If the user
finds  a PDF viewer that doesn't give a **** about these restrictions,
they  can  still  print it. But I think that doesn't really matter for
your scenario anyway. :-)

-- 
Best Regards,
Andreas

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