We're hosting a website and want to prevent customers from downloading a PDF file to their personal computer but only view it in their browser.

Any ideas on how to do this?

2/19/2009 9:04:14 AM

Can't do it.

Downloading to view = downloading to save.

2/19/2009 9:11:04 AM

does it have to be a pdf?

2/19/2009 10:51:37 AM

google "embed pdf html"

http://blogs.adobe.com/pdfdevjunkie/2007/08/using_the_html_embed_tag_to_di.html

2/19/2009 11:05:34 AM

Embedding it will help stop the innocent. It won't stop the determined.

As gs7 already said, if the user can see it in the browser in any form, it's already been downloaded to their computer. The rest is just a matter of finding the URL or the cache file and copying it.

"Firefox: File -> Save Page As" will usually catch all the files and place them neatly in a directory for you. Not exactly DMCA stuff to break it.

There might be a way to embed DRM in the PDF document. That's left as an exercise to the Acrobat owner.

2/19/2009 11:15:40 AM

what about this?

2/19/2009 11:17:47 AM

Hmm, okay, basically there's no way to prevent a PDF from being saved locally.

We don't want to do DRM, because the only thing available to us is password protection which is easily removed.

2/19/2009 12:21:30 PM

If you don't want them saving it, you need to be using Flash-Flex-Air/Silverlight.

2/19/2009 5:35:50 PM

yeah, pdf isn't really the way to go with this one.

2/19/2009 8:30:04 PM

What does http://www.scribd.com/ use?

2/19/2009 11:28:59 PM

flash

2/19/2009 11:38:07 PM

see if you can restrict printing from this site: http://www.readoz.com/main

2/20/2009 11:01:12 PM

Information wants to be free.

2/22/2009 2:01:33 PM

Quote :

"We don't want to do DRM"

LiveCycle ES provides other DRM options, more access control. It is $$$ though.

2/22/2009 10:34:53 PM