FTFY.
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Maybe try ImageMagick to convert to a jpg. Edit the jpg and smudge the paragraph text.
How would you convert a 1000 page PDF to a single JPG - or even a 2 page PDF?
If I had a 1,000 page PDF that I did not want users to download, I would only show jpgs for the first couple of smudged pages.
Yes, it would need to be a series of images.
Anyway, @Sir_Arcturua if you can answer
you might get something more helpful that our twisted humor.
Disable the right click function on your webpage
Please explain your comment?
that achieves nothing whatsoever - the entire page and all its content is already downloaded before then and disabling a ‘no right click’ script is trivial even if the browser doesn’t disable it by default.
It is a bad idea. You cannot convert a PDF of multiple pages into a jpg
So is expecting people to not download a PDF (which they need to to be able to see it at all) or print a PDF - which some programs allow even if the PDF has printing locked.
so i am just thinking outloud here as to whether the following is possible…
If you opened the pdf in an iframe on your webpage but had a transparent div above it, this should prevent the average user being able to rightclick and print/save the pdf as it will see the div not the pdf. Make the PDF filename be generated randomly and only accessible if loaded via your page. Not sure if the page is saved whether it will download the pdf from the iframe or just try and link it (which wouldn’t matter if it changes name)
Set the print css to make the background of the covering div white to hide the pdf.
Someone determined can still get it though. It’s like on ‘istock.com’ they allow you to download a ‘comp’ image for use while you are working on a design. But it is pretty small so instead i use their zoom tool and zoom in on the picture to the max which loads bigger images. I can then open the media screen on firefox and pick up the biggest image from the list. Sure it has watermarks on it but it’s much better for a draft design than the little pic.
Pretty much anything on the internet can be got/saved/printed if you show it to a user.
Thanks a lot.
that will block the people who don’t want to steal it anyway and will do nothing to block the would be thieves who just grab all the files directly from their browser cache. Thieves are never aware of any measures applied to web pages to try to prevent theft because they always go straight to the copy already downloaded to their computer.
true. But i think most of us agree already that it is not possible to show a pdf without showing it ?!?! It was more whether it would stop the majority of people bothering to nick it and whether the concept would work.
I remember a website (think it was expertsexchange.org) that would rank high for coding question and everytime i click on it i remembered they wanted you to sign up/pay to see the answer which was annoying… until i realised that all of the answers were actually just at the bottom of the very long page!! They just worked on the majority of people not realizing. Which also explained how google was able to index it.
those inclined to nick it will do so from their browser cache where there is nothing blocking them from doing so. Only those who are not intending to nick it will view it in the browser itself.
but you are assuming the people who may take it would have that level of knowledge. We don’t know what the OP pdf is about. If it is about website coding then it is more likely someone wanting to take it will know how to do that. But if it is about dress making patterns then i would guess (perhaps wrongly - nothing to say you can’t make dresses and be a coder) it is less likely to know how to pick up a pdf from the browser cache or monkey with disabling this or that. The majority of people will stop at trying to right click and ‘save-as’. Which should hopefully stop joe public from saving the pdf and uploading it to their blog.
But as we said any determined person will ultimately be able to get it. It will be a case of deciding at what level of loss the OP is happy with.
One way that can’t be blocked is someone going to the file menu of their browser and selecting “Save Page As”
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if they ‘save page as’ and it contains an iframe with a dynamically generated path that changes would it still show anything but the iframe holding page?
All the files in the page would be copied from the browser cache to the designated folder.
Selecting Save Page As doesn’t download anything because everything it is saving has already been downloaded.
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There are paid serverside solutions to show the content of a PDF-file without downloading it.
Example: https://flippingbook.com/
A free online alternative is this: https://issuu.com/lislut/docs/web__hg_sommerdm_2016