Keth wrote:

>What I do not have is an Acrobat *writer*. So I cannot
>create pdf files. I can only read pdf files that already
>exist. One drawback is that the Acrobat reader does not
>respond to "cut-and-paste", i.e. you cannot transfer
>sections of acrobat texts to your clipboard, and from there
>to other editors. That means that acrobat material is more
>cumbersome to work with, for example in connection with
>translations, because you then cannot just insert translations
>"in-between" given text lines. This drawback may however
>not be very important.

it is also quite intentional - one of the uses for which PDF was designed
is for web publishing of copyrighted material, and the reason you cannot
cut and paste the contents is because by default, the files are read-only -
even with the full version of Acrobat, you would not be able to do so,
unless the author chose to save the file specifically to allow that.

the purpose is so that someone can publish their work online, and still
keep control over it - it's not possible to just copy it, edit out the
copyright information, and redistribute it as text. actually, it is
possible to crack PDF, but based on the reports I've read, it actually
takes less time to print out a document, and scan it with OCR software,
than it takes to crack the format and convert the file into text - so PDF
is actually "more secure" than a book in that regard, in that the book is
already printed and ready to scan.

my only complaint about PDF is that it is a proprietary format - I think it
would be better to have an open format which offered such security, so
anyone who wanted to write software for it, could (like using RTF instead
of Word DOC) - as it stands, if you want to create PDF files, you have to
buy Adobe Acrobat - no one else is even legally allowed to create software
which can read or write PDF files.

ah, well... it's probably coming before too long...

-Selv

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