Hi everyone,
In the past, I came across several PDF files which allowed the selection & copying of text, but when pasting it (into Word for example) the pasted text would consist of weird characters (and not the text as seen in the pdf-file).
=> My question is whether this was intended by the files' authors or whether this was a mere software problem?
And if it was intended, how to achieve this effect?
I'm currently thinking of publishing some of my (academic) articles online, but would like to disable copy&paste- but not the conventional way: I know that the 'normal' encryption with password which disables selection or copying of text can easily be cracked with software freely available. So I thought that the "encryption" as described above (apparently a replacement of characters) would be much more effective.
One such 'encrypted' file was created with PDFCreator (version 0.9.3, GPL Ghostscript 8.54, PDF version 1.54) so I installed PDFCreator (0.9.7) today but could not achieve the desired result.
Looking for an answer, I have googled the web for a while now and searched various discussion forums but to no avail - can anyone help me please!?!
- is my idea possible? how? or were the files I saw just 'encrypted' by coincidence/error?
- is there a parameter (in Ghostscript) for this? or is there a software that can achieve this effect?
Thanks a lot in advance for your comments, ideas and help!!
.