Virus on page?

On Fri, 22 Mar 2019 14:34:24 -0400, "Mayayana"
wrote:

"Commander Kinsey" wrote

| Certainly not a good template format. I use PDFs for
| business estimates and receipts, but I always write it in
| Libre Office as a doc. The PDF is only for sending to
| the customer.
|
| The thing is you never know when someone might want to edit what you sent.

So don't send a PDF. That's not what PDFs are for. I don't
see the conflict. If you want to let them edit then why not
send a TXT or DOC?

I send a PDF *because* I don't want or expect that
my customer will be editing my estimate. And they
may want to print it out to be a comfortingly official
looking piece of paper. Printable and not easily editable.
That's what PDF is for. For any other purpose it's a
poor choice.

If I want them to edit something -- say a work punch
list -- then I'd send TXT. (Personally I see very little use
for DOC outside of offices. But some people live in
MS Word and for them a DOC or DOCX seems convenient
and sensible.) Then when you send the thing out as the
official council announcement it can go as PDF. Even
then, the PDF choice is only for the purpose of making
the file seem officious and immutable.

I prefer RTF for "editable" format. It's more "professional"
looking than TXT. It has a few exploits, but none as serious as DOC
and DOCX with macros.
Atlantis lite is a good editor, (almost) portable, tiny. and
free.

https://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/lite.htm

As to PDF's you can usually copy and paste the contents and
produce an altered version. Plenty of software with OCR that do a good
job. No guarantee at all it's an "original' document.
[]'s
--
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012
Nineteen Eighty-Four was a work of FICTION !!!! - Orwell

"Shadow" wrote

| I prefer RTF for "editable" format. It's more "professional"
| looking than TXT. It has a few exploits, but none as serious as DOC
| and DOCX with macros.

RTF is handy, and widely supported. It's surprising
people don't use it more. I still use Wordpad/Write.
But I tend to more often use HTML because it provides
so many options for style and format, with minimal work.

Maybe one reason for RTF not being popular is also
that it's always lagged far behind MS Word. It's only
in later versions that it's been possible to do things like
include images, so it's very hard to make something that
looks as professional as a DOC. Atlantis seems to be using
its own RTF window. Maybe a Delphi version? But
presumably that conforms to Microsoft's standards,
which are limited. The menu makes it look like it does
all kinds of things, but mostly it's just text, fonts, and
the ability to paste an image.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...-edit-controls


With my business receipts I have a logo, a section for
writing the customer name/address, then numerous lines
for writing items with cost. Simple to do in a DOC. Extremely
labor-intensive for HTML to do. And I don't think RTF can
even do something like the compound table needed for
the lines.
So I made a template receipt long ago and just fill in
a blank copy in Libre Office, then export that as PDF
to send to customers.

Mayayana wrote:
"Commander Kinsey" wrote

| PDF for graphics and artwork.
|
| Do you really think we can't press "printscreen"?
|

Yes. You can also counterfeit money. But there's
a difference between giving you a high quality TIF
vs a lower quality JPG in a PDF that you then copy
at 96 ppi. Getting good quality from that will be harder
or impossible. And there's a deliberate effort required
on your part to break the law. Many people will pick up
a wallet on the street and not tell anyone if no one
sees them. Few people will actually pick your pocket
and consciously steal your wallet. PDFs are similar.

Also big difference when it is a *vector* PDF. And editing text is more
difficult. Yes you *can* take a screenshot. There are those who always
steal; but editing my artwork without written consent would violate the
copyright my clients agree to with the project.

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

Jonathan N. Little wrote:
Mayayana wrote:
"Commander Kinsey" wrote

| PDF for graphics and artwork.
|
| Do you really think we can't press "printscreen"?
|

Yes. You can also counterfeit money. But there's
a difference between giving you a high quality TIF
vs a lower quality JPG in a PDF that you then copy
at 96 ppi. Getting good quality from that will be harder
or impossible. And there's a deliberate effort required
on your part to break the law. Many people will pick up
a wallet on the street and not tell anyone if no one
sees them. Few people will actually pick your pocket
and consciously steal your wallet. PDFs are similar.

Also big difference when it is a *vector* PDF. And editing text is more
difficult. Yes you *can* take a screenshot. There are those who always
steal; but editing my artwork without written consent would violate the
copyright my clients agree to with the project.


If you happen to have a large virtual desktop for Windows,
you can resize the PDF so it fills the virtual desktop,
and then take your screenshot. The effective result
could be a higher equivalent resolution, in one snapshot.

I've also done this in Linux. You can do this with
a modeline or an xorg.conf edit.

A PDF can hide image content which has a higher
resolution than you can see on the screen. A JPG resized
so that it is 600DPI as far as the image goes,
presents 96ppi on the LCD monitor. Doing printscreen
of the entire page, only captures the 96 pixel per inch
information. Zooming in of course, and snapshotting "segments"
of the image, captures the information, but... slowly, and
with a lot of fuss. An application like Microsoft ICE could
automate reassembly, if it chooses to work that day. Feed it
16 overlapping "patches" of screenshots, and it can make
one image out of it. I gave it something "easy" to
do the other day, and the operation actually failed.

But if you make a virtual desktop, and resize Acrobat so
it fills that virtual desktop, eventually you can make
the virtual screen big enough, that you can capture
all 600DPI of the picture content. In one screenshot.

On Windows, this is a kind of "pan and scan". And I don't
know if Windows 10 still supports this or not. I was able
to find this procedure, as an example of it. In the past,
at least one video driver (for SIS chipset graphics), did
this sort of behavior, out of the box.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com...=W8ITProPreRel

https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-chan...lution-2377863

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4d36e 968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0000
Display1_DownScalingSupported DWORD 1

And apparently a result of this, is the Display control panel
will offer resolutions above native. It will likely allow values
up to the graphics card limit. In the old days, some of the graphics
cards had a 2K limit on some counter or register, which limited
the fun you could have. Later video cards, support a much
larger value for that counter (at least, compared to 2K or 2^11).

When you get up around 16K on edge for the display area,
the memory subsystem on the OS starts to fidget, and you
might be quite sorry with the level of instability. Just
so you understand there are some practical limits on how
far this can be pushed. Since modern OSes push the notion
of "compositing" and have to support the entire virtual
surface you're defining with this technique, there could
be some "blowback" by trying it :-)

Paul

On 23/03/2019 02:02, Commander Kinsey wrote:

Tax men aren't clever enough.

cough Yes - they are! ;-)

--
David B.
Devon, UK

On 22/03/2019 17.52, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Fri, 22 Mar 2019 12:20:49 -0000, Carlos E.R.
wrote:

On 21/03/2019 21.23, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Thu, 21 Mar 2019 19:17:19 -0000, Chris wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Wed, 20 Mar 2019 18:56:24 -0000, Chris wrote:

Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Tue, 19 Mar 2019 11:23:13 -0000, Carlos E.R.
wrote:

On 19/03/2019 00.16, Commander Kinsey wrote:.

You'd be hard pressed to develop anything worse than Adobe's
Acrobat
Reader.* Just try printing something from it, you won't get
anything
remotely like what's on the screen.* I often have to screengrab
it and
print it from Paintshop Pro.

Huh? I never had any such problem printing from adobe reader
reliably.

I have, I never get the size I expect.* Easier to put it into a
photo
editor with a screengrab, then you can fit to page etc.

Pdfs are vector formats and by definition can be scaled to any size
without
losing resolution*. A pdf print dialogue box always has a "shrink to
fit"
and/or "scale to page" option.

By taking a screenshot your rasterising the page and losing the
benefit of
the pdf.

* Unless it had been saved as raster format. But that's dumb so not
common
these days.

I think the last thing I tried to print was a calendar - I'd found a
website that generates calendars for any month and year in pdf
format.* I
wanted to print most of the page, cutting off the borders, but acrobat
reader was unable to, so I just screengrabbed.* I got the
resolution of
the monitor, which is fine.

Anything should be able to print properly.* PDF doesn't help here.

Actually it does. That's the whole point of the format. It is
completely
device agnostic so it doesn't matter what you're viewing it on or
printing
it with it should print as the author designed it. You often see
forms as
word files and they never print or render properly.

But what about how I want it?

That's not the main use case for pdfs. It's mainly a read-only format -
forms excepted.

However, you can edit them in libreoffice draw or Adobe Illustrator
plus
others. Word allegedly reads them, but always makes a pig's ear of
them.

Why the hell would I want something I can't adjust before printing?* I
might want only the top half, enlarged to fit the page, etc.

But PDFs are not designed for you to alter at will. They are designed to
be printed as is, just expanded or shrinked to page.

Why design something you can't use properly?* Not everyone wants things
exactly the same.

Because that is not "use properly" :-P

When I send a PDF it is print as /I/ intend, not as you intend.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 22/03/2019 14.47, Mayayana wrote:
"Commander Kinsey" wrote

| Why the hell would I want something I can't adjust before printing? I
might want only the top half, enlarged to fit the page, etc.
|

I think it's worth remembering that PDF is basically
a commercial format. It has two main purposes.

1) To print accurately.

2) To provide a relatively immutable document vehicle
for business/commercial/government.

In other words, it's not supposed to let you adjust
it. That's the whole point. That's also why it's such a
horrendous format for actually reading content or
doing much of anything other than printing.

Yep.

For reading content I prefer epub.


But for official people who want to exchange official
documents, PDF allows them at least a functional
level of immutability. HTML, by contrast, is a sort of
peoples' format. It's fairly easy to learn. There are
free editors. And it's very easy to edit. But if someone
wants to send you a contract or other legal paper,
HTML feels wishy washy. PDF feels like a lockbox with
a piece of paper inside.

With LibreOffice I can produce PDFs that include the LO document too, in
the same file. I don't really see why I would use that, but the feature
is there.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 22/03/2019 18.35, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Fri, 22 Mar 2019 17:24:55 -0000, Mayayana
wrote:

"Commander Kinsey" wrote

| So damn useless then.* The number of times I was asked (when working
as IT
support) for a way to simply edit a PDF slightly.* Somebody wanted to
change
a few words, omit a section etc.* Also my neighbour recently (as a
landlord)
wanted to edit a Council made document to make it suitable for renting a
flat.* Almost bloody impossible.* That was the whole point of the
document,
to use as a template!
|

* Certainly not a good template format. I use PDFs for
business estimates and receipts, but I always write it in
Libre Office as a doc. The PDF is only for sending to
the customer.

The thing is you never know when someone might want to edit what you sent.

I do not want them to edit the document at all! That's the point!

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 22/03/2019 22.51, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Fri, 22 Mar 2019 21:36:55 -0000, Mayayana
wrote:

"Jonathan N. Little" wrote

| Commander Kinsey wrote:
|
| The question should be, why are you deliberately preventing them from
| editing it? Why do you care
|
| Copyright protection on original creative work. Allow others to view
and
| print but not modify.
|

*** That, too. But in this case it's not even that.
It's just common sense and good business. The
same reason we don't write out checks, receipts and
bills in pencil. The recipient has no right to change
them and such a change could be harmful as well
as criminal.

** I can only assume that Cmr. Kinsey has
decided to play devil's advocate. His repeated
questioning makes no sense.

Pssst, I can change your bill by simply screengrabbing it.* Your feeble
attempts are futile.* Anyone who wants to change something will do so.

That's why PDFs can be signed. Any modification is verifiable.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 23/03/2019 03.02, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sat, 23 Mar 2019 01:33:25 -0000, Mayayana
wrote:

"Commander Kinsey" wrote

| PDF for graphics and artwork.
|
| Do you really think we can't press "printscreen"?
|

** Yes. You can also counterfeit money. But there's
a difference between giving you a high quality TIF
vs a lower quality JPG in a PDF that you then copy
at 96 ppi. Getting good quality from that will be harder
or impossible.

I can get whatever quality you put in the PDF.* Same as I can get
whatever quality you put in a Word document.* The PDF doesn't protect
you, you're hiding your head in the sand.

And there's a deliberate effort required
on your part to break the law.

Predsing one key on my keyboard ain't breaking the law.* If the image is
on my screen, I can do whatever the **** I like with it.

No, you can't. Not within the law.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 22/03/2019 17.54, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Fri, 22 Mar 2019 12:28:56 -0000, Carlos E.R.
wrote:

On 21/03/2019 20.05, Chris wrote:
Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 20/03/2019 19.56, Chris wrote:
Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Tue, 19 Mar 2019 11:23:13 -0000, Carlos E.R.
wrote:

On 19/03/2019 00.16, Commander Kinsey wrote:.

You'd be hard pressed to develop anything worse than Adobe's
Acrobat
Reader.* Just try printing something from it, you won't get
anything
remotely like what's on the screen.* I often have to screengrab
it and
print it from Paintshop Pro.

Huh? I never had any such problem printing from adobe reader
reliably.

I have, I never get the size I expect.* Easier to put it into a photo
editor with a screengrab, then you can fit to page etc.

Pdfs are vector formats and by definition can be scaled to any size
without
losing resolution*. A pdf print dialogue box always has a "shrink
to fit"
and/or "scale to page" option.

By taking a screenshot your rasterising the page and losing the
benefit of
the pdf.

* Unless it had been saved as raster format. But that's dumb so not
common
these days.

Wait, there are many scanners or scanner applications that save
directly
as PDF. And in that case, they use bitmaps.

That's true. I was meaning pdfs you generally get online.

Well...

I'm in Electronics. Long time ago, we had to purchase electronic
component (like chips) catalogue books, printed in thin paper. Difficult
to find and expensive, at least in my part of the world.

What part of the world?* In the UK we used things like RS components.*
Huge catalogues with everything in them.* They were free if you bought
from them regularly.** Mind you I often went to a cheaper supplier
unless it was something very rare.

They came from the USA.

Like the CMOS 4000 book from National. Way more information, on the
4000 series, that any shop catalogue.


Then came Internet.

Suddenly we had free access to those catalogs, in PDF form, made from
scanning the paper books, in relatively low resolution (some times
almost unreadable), raster format. Horrible things, difficult to scan
(visually) to search for something.

The PDFs were not generated from source, they were scanned material. It
took years till we got real electronic format catalogs, PDFs or html,
that we could run a text search to find what we needed.


Just mentioning online PDFs with bitmap content... :-D


--
Cheers, Carlos.

"Paul" wrote
|
| But if you make a virtual desktop, and resize Acrobat so
| it fills that virtual desktop, eventually you can make
| the virtual screen big enough, that you can capture
| all 600DPI of the picture content. In one screenshot.
|

I guess we'll need to watch out for you and the other
7 people trying to steal 600 DPI graphics and medical
studies out of PDFs.

I actually do a low-tech version of that for my state
taxes. The state of MA have somehow not got their act
together to make fillable forms. Yet they want it
automated on their end. Each letter of a word must go
in its own little box and each checkbox is actually a
small oval. ("The oval must be filled in completely with
a black, NOT BLUE, pen!") I'm imagining some kind
of giant, circa-1970 OCR machine in the cellar of the
statehouse that reads the forms sent in.

It reminds me of the busywork I used to be assigned
in kindergarten: To color in an 8 1/2"x1" piece of paper
with crayon. It was critical that one should leave no
"holidays" because that would indicate that one was a
lazy ass. Will the state send back my forms and fine
me if I miss a spot? I'm not taking any chances!

Since I'll need at least 2 paper copies of my taxes and
want an e-record, I take 2 screenshots of each page,
join them in PSP, fill them out in PSP, then paste that
image back into the PDF. There's really no need to get it
all in one shot.

It's a bit tedious, but not too bad. And easier than filling
in 2-3 sets of forms by hand, then scanning them all in.
The tricky part is figuring out the font size that will spread
the text properly between boxes. The box sizes are not
even the same from one page to the next!

We're getting to an interesting time. Digital media
was never something that could realistically be secured.
Now there are Photoshop tools and video tools that
can make convincing lies of recorded "reality". And there
are people like Cdr. Kinsey, who were probably given far
too much allowance as teenagers, while also living in
a world of digital media, and now believe they have a
right to possess "one of everything" because, hey, the
supply is limitless. He'll probably fight over his right to
a copy of a faded Publishers Clearinghouse ad, as a
matter of principle.

That seems to provide an interesting insight into the
trend toward cashless society. It's insecure, not available
to the poor, creates a parasitic and superfluous middleman
financial class that collects fees on each payment, and
eliminates privacy. But to young people, actual money
may seem like a dirty, germ-infested, insecure artifact.
A "solid" -- something with weight and 3 dimensional
existence that requires physical storage capacity. In
short, an outdated, quirky, inexcusable form of reality.

They think bytes are what's real and immutable, while the
physical world is unpredictable and largely unclassifiable.

I'm curious to see the day when a solar super-flare or
one of a thousand other possible calamities burns out all
the computers. That may actually be much more dangerous
than climate change. Nearly every car, truck, tractor,
toaster, regfrigerator, furnace, phone, light, municipal
service, and computer built from now on will instantly
stop working. All records of modern society will instantly
disappear. Our possessions and debts will remain only in
our own minds. And the best minds in tech seem to be
oblivious to that. Too busy feeling clever that money can
now be manufactured with bytes.

There was a slight taste of that in NYC, when the hurricane
stranded all the cellphone diddlers who'd given up their
landlines and had no radios. Wealthy Manhattan yuppies
were hiking uptown to charge their phones and seek news
about what was happening, as they camped out in their
apartments, living on day-old bagels and leftover take-out.
But that was just a hurricane. Imagine a total breakdown
of every system, from water to transportation... all the
systems that allow 8 million people to live in vertical storage
on that relatively small island, imagining themselves to be
occupying the center of civilization...
Probably about 2 weeks to cannibalism and a month until
they'd all be dead. And in the meantime people would be
offering to pay a now-useless BMW for a glass of water.
And city dwellers will finally understand why rural people
need guns. (Besides the obvious use for hunting deer.)

"Shadow" wrote

| I have no idea what version of RTF Atlantis uses, but it
| allows inserting images and tables.
| M$ seems to include a lot of data when you save as RTF.
| I opened the example file he
|
| http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/RTF
|

That's Microsoft bull****. I wasn't aware the spec had
become so convoluted. And I'm not sure it's relevant.
RTF is really not DOC format. It's one thing to say that
it supports themes, for instance. But it's not really RTF
if only MS Word can recognize and display the themes.
In that case it becomes a kind of variant of DOC format.
So it may as well be saved as a DOC.

The RichEdit window is a system library in Windows.
So in general, RTF is whatever your version of RichEdit
can recognize. But that's typical Microsoft attitude,
assuming that everyone who uses Windows has the
latest MSO installed.

If you open the test file in Wordpad and Atlantis, then
save and open in Notepad, you'll find that you get two
different versions. Atlantis seems to have cooked up
a bit of its own bull****, adding things like user name and
date that would not normally be part of an RTF file. It
may also be supporting a later RTF spec than Windows
RichEdit does.

The bloat of the downloaded
file is due to a ridiculously long list of unused fonts in the
font table, a ridiculous, unused color table, and the
incompatible "themedata" added to the end. It seems to
be Word 2007's somewhat corrupt method for storing
a DOC in an RTF.

The version saved from Wordpad shows the actual RTF
content, which designates the language (1033-English),
2 fonts used, Arial and Calibri, a single color in the color table,
and some formatting markers.

The actual spec is really
fairly simple. The various \ marker codes specify properties
for the following text. Writing a basic "abc" and saving it
gives me this:

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang1033\deflangf e1033{\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fcharset0
Arial;}}
{\*\generator Msftedit 5.41.15.1515;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\f0\fs20 abc\par
}

A font table with one entry, entry 0. Arial.
The encoding before "abc" indicates font 0
(arial) with f0 and font ize as 20 pt - fs20.

It's actually not hard to "manufacture" RTF
because it's all just plain text and escapes
characters. I use it in my own code editor.
At some point I found that it was actually
much faster to create RTF text "by hand"
than to use the EM_* API messages, when
doing things like changing font or color for
a section of text.

Mayayana wrote:
Imagine a total breakdown
of every system, from water to transportation... all the
systems that allow 8 million people to live in vertical storage
on that relatively small island, imagining themselves to be
occupying the center of civilization...

That's the plot of Cyberstorm by Matthew Mather and set in NYC.

In article , Mayayana
wrote:


I actually do a low-tech version of that for my state
taxes. The state of MA have somehow not got their act
together to make fillable forms. Yet they want it
automated on their end. Each letter of a word must go
in its own little box and each checkbox is actually a
small oval. ("The oval must be filled in completely with
a black, NOT BLUE, pen!") I'm imagining some kind
of giant, circa-1970 OCR machine in the cellar of the
statehouse that reads the forms sent in.

It reminds me of the busywork I used to be assigned
in kindergarten: To color in an 8 1/2"x1" piece of paper
with crayon. It was critical that one should leave no
"holidays" because that would indicate that one was a
lazy ass. Will the state send back my forms and fine
me if I miss a spot? I'm not taking any chances!

Since I'll need at least 2 paper copies of my taxes and
want an e-record, I take 2 screenshots of each page,
join them in PSP, fill them out in PSP, then paste that
image back into the PDF. There's really no need to get it
all in one shot.

It's a bit tedious, but not too bad. And easier than filling
in 2-3 sets of forms by hand, then scanning them all in.
The tricky part is figuring out the font size that will spread
the text properly between boxes. The box sizes are not
even the same from one page to the next!

a bit tedious?? that's a *lot* of unnecessary work and you don't have
to put one letter in each box.

if the pdf lacks proper form entry, simply create an annotation with
whatever information the line requires and place it in the appropriate
spot. repeat for each item to be filled out, then save a copy and print
as many paper copies as you want.

or even easier, use tax prep software that outputs the necessary forms
directly, optionally e-filing them with no paper copies needed.