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importing into and customizing .pdf

Forum Index > General Acrobat Topics > importing into and customizing .pdf
2009-07-18 12:32:20
maddogawogg
Registered: Jul 18 2009
Posts: 2

Hi,

Sorry to sound like a noob, but had questions for all you fine folks out there. I was wondering if it's possible to and how one would go about importing / customizing adobe pdfs.

Here's the thing:

Planning on selling original material, art /literature that's been condensced into .pdf format. Will have website etc for people to purchase from.

What we want to do is set it up so that when someone purchases some material, say a pdf book we've created, that maybe it could be set up to automatically add their name or something into the pdf.

Example:

say we're selling a cook book and stan the customer comes to our site. puts in his contact info for emails or whatever and when he purchases the cook book pdf, his name gets printed somewhere on / in the cook book pdf.

so like it would say cook book, purchased by stan on 7/18/09 or something.

reason why i'm asking is one to customize for customers and two, to try to prevent dirtbags from putting pdf on torrent sites. :)

I greatly appreciate any of your input.

thank you.

-maddog

My Product Information:
Acrobat Standard 9.1.1, Windows
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2009-07-18 13:55:49
#1
UVSAR
Expert
Registered: Oct 29 2008
Posts: 1357
There are a number of server options to work with PDF files (through ASP, PHP, Perl etc.) which could be called to imprint something onto a page and deliver the file to the user, however none of those will prevent the recipient from being able to remove that imprint again, given a few minutes work and some free software.

The normal way to tie a PDF to a specific user is to use DRM (via an Adobe DRM server contract), as Adobe products are the only ones which can open DRM-locked files, and they won't allow users to remove it again. Even so it's not fully secure unless it's prohibited from print, as otherwise any legit user with Acrobat can open the PDF, re-print to Distiller, and remove the DRM that way.

There are several systems to digitally watermark PDFs so that you can identify the source of a copy in the wild, but the user can't see anything visible on the document and so can't remove it - which involve writing low-level data into the PDF stream, but they're very proprietary and we of course won't tell anyone precisely what and where the watermark data is, or they'd be able to remove it.
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