[scribus] PDF/A additional thought-question-request

Barry McKenna bmcken at pobox.com
Wed Jul 20 21:57:34 UTC 2011


Stefan,

Thanks for bringing that up.

Here's a link to Adobe's Digital Editions FAQ:

http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/faq/

One of the questions is "What file formats does Digital Editions 
support?"

"PDF/A and EPUB are the two publication-level content types."

And that reference to "PDF/A" is also a link to the Wikipedia page.

Just following that answer on the file formats is the question
"Why do I need to authorize my computer with my Adobe ID?"

And the answer, in part is:

"Some digital publications that you purchase online or check out from 
a library may contain digital rights management (DRM) protection that 
restricts the items from being shared with others."

So, I think, but I'm not totally sure, that Adobe Reader will not 
work with PDF/A, which is apparently the function of Digital Editions 
software with works with a special Adobe ID.

So apparently DRM is not to be conflated with encryption, or that's 
my best guess for now, but if you find anything else, please let us know.

Here's a bried Wikipedia page, for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Digital_Editions

...which also reports that the scheme has been hacked and released to 
the web, which just adds more to whole drama...

Barry

On 7/20/2011 1:57 PM, Stefan Löffler wrote:
> Hi,
>
> a little off-topic, but maybe interesting nevertheless:
>
> On 2011-07-20 21:24, Barry McKenna wrote:
>> However, I read the June comments that there seems to be no support
>> for including EPUB, and I hope that the developers do not feel the
>> same way about PDF/A. It seems to me that a Scribus that can't output
>> to a password or copy-protected format is missing a major need of
>> small/individual publishers and users/readers.
>
> I'm curious - Wikipedia states for PDF/A that "Encryption is forbidden."
> Yet in the pdf standard, passwords are mentioned only in relation to
> encryption (according to the index). Which makes sense, of course,
> because what good is password-protection if you can simply remove it
> from a (plain text) file.
>
> So, maybe I'm on the wrong track here, but it seems to me that PDF/A
> explicitly prevents password protection (it's primary purpose being to
> offer a format for archiving, i.e., making things available to the
> future, not preventing access)?
>
> Regards,
> Stefan
>
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