<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">PDF files can only be edited with something like Acrobat or a tool that lets you do that. </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">So they’re effectively “read only” by default without the right tools.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Even then, when you create a PDF file, depending what you use, you can set an option that prevents or allows the text to be selected and copied to the clipboard.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">But just about every OCR app in existence lets you feed it PDF files and get an editable Word or text file back.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Not to mention there are websites that will OCR a few pages of a PDF file for free.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">(At my last job, they had a client with a couple dozen offices around the country. Someone at each office would grab a stack of invoices and drop them into a scanner every night and scan them; it would save the lot to a big PDF file that they’d upload to an FTP site on our server. I wrote an app that would periodically check for new files and run them through an OCR app to extract data from each invoice and put it into a database. The previous software would scan the entire page and save the results, although we only needed a few fields. Scanning only the parts of the page with the data we were looking for sped things up quite a bit. But the point is that the PDF files their scanners created were pretty useless even with Acrobat since they were just a big batch of scanned images.)</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I think you’re asking the wrong question. Try stating the problem you’re actually trying to address.</div><div class=""><br class=""><div class="">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-position: normal; line-height: normal;"><div class="">-David Schwartz</div><div class=""><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span>
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<div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Aug 10, 2021, at 12:42 PM, Shawn Badger via PLUG-discuss <<a href="mailto:plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org" class="">plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class="">One option would be to turn it into an image which is then put into the pdf. Not impossible to change just more work to change.</div><br class=""><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 11:48 PM Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss <<a href="mailto:plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org" class="">plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org</a>> wrote:<br class=""></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">joe--- via PLUG-discuss said on Fri, 06 Aug 2021 16:48:59 -0700<br class="">
<br class="">
>How to make a pdf read only?<br class="">
><br class="">
>I'm sure I've done this in the past,<br class="">
>but can't remember how. Searched the<br class="">
>net but found no solution.<br class="">
><br class="">
>Do not want to convert to an image<br class="">
>but just want a read-only pdf.<br class="">
<br class="">
I think it's impossible to make a truly read-only pdf. Somebody could<br class="">
always open it in Vim and tamper with it, or use one of the several PDF<br class="">
modification tools to convert it to a form that can be written to. Or<br class="">
import it into Inkscape, modify it as an image, and convert back to PDF.<br class="">
<br class="">
If you mean make it so it's not modifyable in Acrobat, there's probably<br class="">
a way to do that.<br class="">
<br class="">
SteveT<br class="">
<br class="">
Steve Litt <br class="">
Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful<br class="">
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