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[web] protected document preview

Started by Kelly G Dec 8, 2008 at 2:58 PM 4 replies 900+ views

Original Post

Dec 8, 2008 at 2:58 PM

I want to do something like Amazon.com's preview or Google books, where you can preview the document readily, but the page effectively hinders your attempts to print, save or copy the file. Currently my documents are Word and PDF but I could convert them. Are there any free or inexpensive resources available to implement such a system?

Sneftel

296

Sneftel

Dec 8, 2008 at 2:59 PM

PDF already offers this sort of protection. I'm not sure about free or inexpensive. Gotta spend money to make money.

frankusthenerd

243

frankusthenerd

Dec 8, 2008 at 3:42 PM

Quote:
Original post by Sneftel
PDF already offers this sort of protection. I'm not sure about free or inexpensive. Gotta spend money to make money.

You just took the words out of my mouth!

leiavoia

129

leiavoia

Dec 8, 2008 at 7:20 PM

Even i know how to copy / save the images from Amazon's previewer. There's always a way around it. With any kind of browser text, it's as simple as copy->paste. With images and PDF, you just Save As. You could encrypt and password-protect the PDFs and then hand out the password, but that's cumbersome.

The best way is simply to not transmit the info in the first place. Consider sending "excerpts" instead.

frankusthenerd

243

frankusthenerd

Dec 9, 2008 at 3:43 PM

You could write a document viewer and java and install it as a java applet. You'd have something like a pdf viewer and you can control printing and stuff but the thing is that someone can always do and ALT-PrintScreen to get parts of the document. So the best thing is only to show a few pages of the document as a preview.

Kelly G

Author

Kelly G

Dec 10, 2008 at 11:24 PM

Quote:
Gotta spend money to make money.

Aw, so pessimistic! :D

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