[tex-live] [beccari@polito.it: Bug-feature in pdfTeX?]

Sebastian Rahtz sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk
Sat, 2 Mar 2002 21:19:45 +0000


can anyone comment on this? it puzzles me.

sebastian


----- Forwarded message from Claudio Beccari <beccari@polito.it> -----

From: Claudio Beccari <beccari@polito.it>
Subject: Bug-feature in pdfTeX?
To: sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk

Dear All,
I am sending this mail to the three of you (Thanh, Sebastian, Hans), 
because I actually did not understand who is taking care of the 
documentation and who of the FAQs, while I perfectly know that Thanh is 
taking care of the program (by the way I read your thesis on TUGboat; 
excellent work; my congratulations!). And since I do not know if what I am 
going to explain is a bug to be corrected, a feature to be documented or 
just a frequent asked question to be answered I leave it up to you to decide.

I am perfectly happy with pdfLaTeX; when it will be able to deal with eps 
material I'll be even happier, but the situation is perfectly allright even 
with the actual situation.

The bug/feature I noticed takes place in connection with the pdf file 
produced, but it shows up when Adobe Acrobat (version 4) is used on the pdf 
file produced with pdfLaTeX.

With Adobe Acrobat it is possible to set two passwords, one for accessing 
the document and another to set permissions and security features connected 
to the document. While these passwords are settable and perform correctly 
on a pdf file produced with Acrobat Distiller, they are not settable on a 
pdf file produced with pdfLaTeX.

Is this a feature? Is it an unintended result and a small incompatibility? 
Is it something Thanh could not implement because of classified information?

I do not know how many people are used to set security setting on their 
documents, but this is one of the most interesting properties of the pdf 
format, therefore if it was possible, I'd suggest to study the problem and 
hopefully to solve it; meanwhile I'd update the documentations (I am 
referring to the manual dated on the 21st of January 2000, which is the 
version distributed with MiKTeX) so as to inform all pdf(La)TeX-users what 
they can actually do and what is not permitted with pdf files produced with 
pdfTeX.

While thanking you for your attention, I send you all my best regards

Claudio Beccari


==============================
prof. Claudio Beccari
Dipartimento di Elettronica
Politecnico di Torino
Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24
10129 TORINO, Italy
Tel.: (+39)0115644026
Fax.: (+39)0115644099




----- End forwarded message -----

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Sebastian Rahtz      OUCS Information Manager
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431