If you want maximum security, open and resave your PDF in Photoshop, which will rasterize the text. Sure, it’ll be a larger file, but it will be uneditable - well except as an image.
Yeah, that’s what I thought. I had always assumed that pdf was used only when you needed a facsimile-type version of something. I had no idea it was being used in cases where html could be used. I mean, it’s a total pain in the ass; that Adobe reader is so clunky that when I find a web page in pdf format I always skip it unless I absolutely need the information.
MathML is a W3C specification and already supported by several browsers.
UnuMondo
Math can be written in pure HTML, but it’s not pretty and it’s not easy to modify manually. See my page on LaTeX versus HTML.
FYI: You can load MS Office files and make .pdf files with one of the later versions OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) for free. Not sure which version has this capability; it might still be beta.
HTML is a mark-up language. It is concerned with page structure. When coded correctly, an HTML file has no style information (which should be stored separately in a style sheet). The advantage of this is that the same data can be interpreted through a number of different devices and media (graphical browsers, text-only browsers, TVs, projectors, printed pages, cell phones, Braille readers, speech readers, etc.).
PDF is concerned with presentation, particularly in print. PDFs look exactly the same no matter what you view them on. This means that you can guarantee the exact same document will print out on one machine with Acrobat Reader as on another. This gives the document’s designer a level of control that simply isn’t available with other data formats such as HTML (even with CSS). Sometimes complete control over presentation is more important than structure. (When you get down to it, the web is rather a unpredictable medium. Even if you restrict it to just graphical web browsers on PCs, you have variables such as the user’s browser version, operating system, installed fonts, screen resolution, any user style sheets that will override the author style sheet, etc. that simply cannot all be accounted for.)
Other formats, such as Microsoft Word, get torn apart in this lovely rant (also available in PDF :).
I’ll just echo what others have said and say that one key is the WYSIWYG as far as printed documents go.
When I was working for a health insurance company, one of my oh-so exciting tasks was to make pdfs of all of our existing contract documents so that they would be available on the web.
The pdfs could be printed out and would look exactly like the documents folks got in the mail. They were already formatted, paginated, and all that good stuff. Making them HTML would be pointless, and cause more problems than it would solve.
Also, when we sent documents to the printer, the only way we’d know exactly what they should look like was by making our own pdf print-out to check.
afaik all MS Office applications have a hot button for making PDFs. If not, you can switch your Printer to Acrobat Distiller and generate the PDF that way.
I don’t think they have that by default, Knowed Out; you have to purchase additonal software for that capability. And I’m pretty sure Acrobat Distiller isn’t free.
MacOS X has a built-in “print to PDF” option; it’s part of the OS so it works with all applications.
There are also several freebie printer drivers for other platforms, such as Print2PDF (by the same guy who wrote Print2Pict) for MacOS 8/9.
There is also the original free work-around: install any PostScript printer driver (e.g., Apple LaserWriter for MacOS 9, HP LaserJet w/PostScript option for most flavors of Windows) and print to file. The “file” of a PostScript printer driver will be a PostScript file. Download GhostScript and use the menu command PS-2-PDF and it will convert the raw postscript into a PDF.
I have Acrobat installed but I have no idea how to use it to edit a PDF document. Ïf I want to generate a PDF document I just generate the document in MS-WOrd and then “print” it to PDF. I haven’t the slightest clue as to how to use Acrobat for that and it seems very counter-intuitive.
Sailor, PDFs weren’t originally designed to be edited, since their big redeeming feature is that they can’t be changed. But Acrobat 4.0 and beyond has a Touchup Text Tool (the ghosty T on your toolbar) that you can use to highlight and change text.
It’s mainly for those occasions where the final copy is about to go to press and somebody spots an error like Sailor spelled as Sialor. They can make that minor change without having to start all over again. It’s a limited tool, but it’ll do in a pinch.
Knowed Out, so what can one do with Acrobat? I mean, if I use another application to create the document and just use Acrobat as a printer, what is the use of the Acrobat program which opens the file?
Not so. At an office I worked at, any PDF document would print just fine, but without any spaces between the words. Needless to say this made reading things very difficult. The problem was easy to fix, you had to open some dialogue box and check off an option (something about rasters), but the problem was communicating this to everyone else in the office who needed to print PDFs, and repeating it over and over until they understood.
At the same office I noted that on the computer I used that had Internet access, if you downloaded a PDF from Explorer, the “find” function didn’t work. Which, when looking for a certain section of a 300-page document with no Table of Contents or Index, is a major pain. I was told it was because someone upgraded Explorer but not Acrobat.
I know that these are all “little” problems with easy fixes, and that the new software doesn’t have them, and so on. But the fact is that many computer users are highly apathetic about the details of how their computers work - I saw a woman freak out once because her computer was “frozen” (the window she wanted wasn’t selected so she couldn’t type anything) - and are not using the most up-to-date version possible.
Anyhoo, just saying that many users have trouble with PDFs and aren’t at the level that some of y’all are in order to deal with it.