Q: We are aware that the new version of Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro enables
additional rights that allow PDF files to be modified and saved locally
using free Reader. If we use your PDFNet SDK product to open,
pre-populate, and re-save the PDF file, would these additional rights
be preserved or would they be overwritten in essence disabling the
additional "Reader save rights" which were included in the original
PDF.
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A:
Unless you explicitly edit Adobe's 'rights enable' data, PDFNet will
not touch this information.
'rights enable' data is located under
'trailer/Root/ViewerPreferences/Rights' in a PDF document (you may want
to use CosEdit - http://www.pdftron.com/cosedit or PDFNet itselft to
inspect this data).
The problem is that Adobe is also setting a digital signature which
will most likely render the 'rights enable' dictionary invalid (you may
want to give it a try). Although it would be straightforward to
reverse-engineer Adobe's proprietary algorithm for tagging rights
enabled PDF documents, this would most likely amount to software
'cracking' and would be illegal. As a result, I doubt that there is any
third-party PDF solution that will allow you to 'rights enable' PDF.
As a workaround, we have several clients that have implemented Acrobat
Pro like form-filling functionality using PDFNet SDK and are offering
their solutions as free downloadable ActiveX/.NET components or as part
of custom applications to their clients.
Q: Thanks for the info. As a test, I used PDFNet SDK and performed a
simple Open operation (on a rights-enabled PDF), followed directly by a
Save operation without modifying any of the PDF content.
Unfortunately, when I reopened the PDF in Reader, as you stated, the
rights-enabled dictionary was invalidated and as a result was presented
with a message box indicating such and the "Save" functionality in
Reader was no longer available. This is quite frustrating for us. I
am not too clear on what some out your clients are doing as a
workaround? After the "Save" operation performed by the PDFNet SDK,
the rights are removed, so how do they continue to offer "edit"
capability? Is there a way to revalidate the rights dictionary.
Thanks for all your help. Adobe should not be doing this.
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A:
Unfortunately, for legal reasons, there are absolutely no commercial
third-party PDF components on the market that will allow you to
'rights-enable' Acrobat Reader. The only possible workaround is to
'break free' from Adobe (and their rights enabled Reader) and to
develop your own version of 'Acrobat'. Using PDFNet SDK
(http://www.pdftron.com/net) you could implement a .NET component (or
an ActiveX control) similar to Acrobat ActiveX component that will
allow your users to fill-out forms, add comments, markup, edit the
document, etc. This way you are not locked-in other Adobe solutions and
are free to implement any other functionality that is not even
available in 'rights enabled' Reader. Many of our clients
(http://www.pdftron.com/customers/customers.html) have implemented this
type of functionality in their applications and workflows. We are also
in the process of releasing additional pre-packaged components that
will make the entire process even simpler.