Try master pdf editor, this makes you hate pdf's less. Use the old/free one, or you will hate it again. I deal with the whole "you need to sign *this* thing" all the time, so I open their crap pdf in master pdf editor, insert a transparent png of my signature, save, and send it back. They never know I didn't reprint, sign, scan, and feed them back whatever. I can do pretty much whatever to most pdf's as people don't lock them down (hint - I do, no one else does). If they don't use pdf security, you can do most anything to a pdf in master pdf editor if you've ever used photoshop, gimp, illustrator, inkscape, or whatever. Saves me the hassle of signing dead trees as a silly fad from the last century. -mb On Tue, Aug 10, 2021 at 1:06 PM David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss < plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote: > PDF files can only be edited with something like Acrobat or a tool that > lets you do that. > > So they’re effectively “read only” by default without the right tools. > > 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. > > But just about every OCR app in existence lets you feed it PDF files and > get an editable Word or text file back. > > Not to mention there are websites that will OCR a few pages of a PDF file > for free. > > (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.) > > I think you’re asking the wrong question. Try stating the problem you’re > actually trying to address. > > -David Schwartz > > > > On Aug 10, 2021, at 12:42 PM, Shawn Badger via PLUG-discuss < > plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote: > > 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. > > On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 11:48 PM Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss < > plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote: > >> joe--- via PLUG-discuss said on Fri, 06 Aug 2021 16:48:59 -0700 >> >> >How to make a pdf read only? >> > >> >I'm sure I've done this in the past, >> >but can't remember how. Searched the >> >net but found no solution. >> > >> >Do not want to convert to an image >> >but just want a read-only pdf. >> >> I think it's impossible to make a truly read-only pdf. Somebody could >> always open it in Vim and tamper with it, or use one of the several PDF >> modification tools to convert it to a form that can be written to. Or >> import it into Inkscape, modify it as an image, and convert back to PDF. >> >> If you mean make it so it's not modifyable in Acrobat, there's probably >> a way to do that. >> >> SteveT >> >> Steve Litt >> Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful >> Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques >> >> --------------------------------------------------- >> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org >> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: >> https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss >> > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > > > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss