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GMail Downgraded, No Longer Cracks PDFs

boingboing.net — "Gmail has crippled its "View as HTML" functionality so as to comply with Adobe's PDF copy-control scheme."

Who dugg this? Made popular May 15, 2006

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  • HackWithRamzi, on 10/12/2007, -3/+75For online viewing, yes, for printing, no.
  • shiftt, on 10/12/2007, -1/+64The original concept is still a good idea - a document that you can open regardless of what platform you're using.
  • kajoob, on 10/12/2007, -10/+51zealot = noun
  • samdu, on 10/12/2007, -3/+39"For online viewing, yes, for printing, no."

    As an extension of that thought, PDF was a minor godsend to printers and service agencies. It made it very easy to package a document for professional printing. Now it doesn't matter what application or platform you generated your document on, you can send it to a printer and know that it'll come out exactly as laid out in a single file. It used to take having the same program (and often times on the same platform - Linux, Amiga, etc... Not invited) and having to gather all of the art and font assets. PDF isn't ideal for viewing content online, but it definitely serves a good purpose.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -24/+56PDF sucks anyway.
  • PayneX, on 10/12/2007, -2/+26I prefer: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/foxitreader/foxitreader_setup.exe
    Super fast, and doesn't load at boot like acrobat does.
    It would probably be more sucessful if they named it "Acrobat Alternative".
  • mordain, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19Are you saying PDF sucks or the Adobe reader sucks?
  • dracula7, on 10/12/2007, -18/+32pdfs arent bad... if youre using a mac ;) ;)
  • Ignignokt01, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Seriously, Adobe Reader takes too god damn long to load up anyways, even longer than Photoshop. (for me, that is, it obviously differs depending on the computer hardware)
  • brownspank, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14"Shut up vocabulary nazi, you know what he meant"

    It's this mentality that's slowly degrading grammar awareness.
  • donatj, on 10/12/2007, -7/+18PDF's do suck, I use Foxit reader rather than adobe, much faster.
  • strcmp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Why do you think that PDF sucks? It is an open specification that allows very rich cross-platform document presentation. My guess is that you use Adobe Reader on Windows, which does suck. As dracula7 pointed out, PDF files are much less of a hassle with OS X. Hopefully other platforms will reach the level of PDF handling supported by OS X and people won't have to get angry if you link to a PDF file.

    P.S. if you're using a Mac, you can "crack" PDFs in ColorSync Utility (located in /Applications/Utilities/). I'm sure there are PDF readers on Windows and Linux that don't obey the PDF DRM.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -22/+32Not to zealot for Gmail, but it was against the whole concept of the pdf.
  • snlildude87, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14once something gets modded down, everyone else goes with the crowd. lame, isn't it?
  • brainache, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9@bscott86
    Yeah sure, GIF is great for pictures, and HTML for web content, but for a digital version of a paper document, PDF works the best. HTML changes depending on how the browser renders it and what the frame size is etc and GIF files come out mega big. PDF is a fixed size file, of a reasonable size, you can use obscure fonts and they will be preserved when you move the doc to another machine. If you basically want to send the facsimile of a document to another computer/platform, PDF will always give you an exact copy. That's why it was designed, that's why it's useful. Just don't use Acrobat Reader when you can avoid it. Get a light PDF reader like Foxit.
  • smash, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9That sucks. Someone come up with another solution :)
  • Jazzed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8So use other, faster, PDF software? There's plenty available.

    Mac OS X users have Preview (seemingly instant load), Linux users have lots of easy options (I tend to just use the GNOME variant of xpdf), Windows users seem to like Foxit (haven't tried it myself).
  • codyman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9I like using PDF files since they are easy to send to people and you don't have to worry about formatting issues. But I HATE IT when you're browsing the web and all the sudden firefox comes a hault because its loading a pdf into your browser...
  • chad78, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7That sucks. I really liked that feature. I will just have to keep using my firefox extention to do it then....
  • ascalonx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I think a lot of you are under the misconception that PDF is what is slow. It's not the format, the format is actually pretty decent, and much smaller than sending a .doc file. Acrobat is the what is terribly slow about viewing pdf's. That's why many people are saying that foxit is really good for viewing pdf's. The problem is mostly because of all of the pluggin's that get loaded when you start acrobat. My acrobat is really fast though, I removed all of the unnecessary pluggins and acrobat loads probably 100 times faster now. There are tuts all over the place online to find out how to do so.

    Back on topic, I hate drm....any kind of drm, it's SO evil.
  • phatpat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Read the article. It will still work for normal PDF's, just not DRM'd ones. Seems reasonable to me.
  • Lumiras, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7that really, really, really sucks. Acrobat either crashes FF for me, or it takes 20 mintues for the PDF to load.....this is a dark day
  • Nathan07, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Direct link to source of story:

    http://akira.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/andreas/blog/archives/2006/05/gmail-cripples-drmed-pdf-files-view-as-html-functionality.html
  • C00001, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Flashpaper loads faster and is much more responsive, and it's rendered by flashplayer. It's not the best for every situation, but it's at least a different approach to something that has been done the same since acrobat came out.
  • quinnk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I want to re-emphasize what phatpat posted:

    THIS ONLY APPLIES TO PROTECTED/RESTRICTED PDFs!

    Regular PDFs (ones without view/print/edit restrictions) still open in GMail just fine. To me this is quite acceptable. The last time I received a protected PDF via email was never. The only time I make them is when I'm throwing them onto a web server (rarely).
  • Tomos, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4PayneX @ A link to Foxit reader setup.exe?
    Use foxit standalone.. no registry entries. Works immediately as a portable app too.

    Seriously folks, this is a 1MB pdf viewer that opens in less than 1 second. I don't know what Adobe are doing, but this little app beats it hands down.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5PDF is slow, but it's a godsend for the printing industry. I own and operate a small town newspaper and we send our pages view ftp in pdf format, CMYK, mind.

    All other formats tend to be sloppy or not turn out correct. (any MS Office Format, Jpeg, Bmp, you name it.)
  • cinder, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I agree. I tolerated PDFs when I used Acrobat Reader. Since I found FoxIt Reader, they don't bother me so much (and Acrobat is no where to be found on my computer). :)
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4good job whoever posted this on digg. i knew this would happen when i saw it hit the front page. now i'm gonna have to install some *****. not that i have a strong need to convert pdf's to something else, but everyone in a while, it is much easier to just use gmail.
  • m00nmaster, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4You, sir, are mistaken and a fool.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf
  • samdu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Somewhat off topic, but, am I the only one that's missing the Google Cache link to every search result now? Is the cache gone?
  • merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3If you can read a file, you can steal its content. It's that simple. Even if acrobat secures PDF and all PDF readers, there's no reason you couldn't just take screenshots and feed them through an OCR app.

    OCR apps even do font matching these days, and recognize and isolate images. You could probably produce an _exact_ duplicate of the document trivially.
  • chrisgeleven, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Acrobat Reader 7.0.7 is much better/faster. If it doesn't load fast on your computer, then your computer has issues.

    It isn't as fast as say Acrobat 4.0 or Preview on OS X, but it is fast enough.
  • chembro84, on 10/12/2007, -6/+9Why the hell was this modded down so hard?
  • rm999, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Foxit is a great program and I use it because it is light and fast and has the same functionality as adobe. Keep in mind, however, that its search doesn't work quite as well as adobe's - it will often entirely miss something when you search for it, and other times it claims and it can't find a term when it does find it - kinda buggy I guess.
  • LordLucless, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@shiftt: I thought so too, until a recent version of some Adobe software started respecting the copy-lock bits in font files. So when generating the PDF, any font files that had this bit set would not be included in the document. It totally destroyed the whole point of generating a PDF.

    Now, fonts are like any content in that their creators need some protection, but not at the cost of destroying their usefulness. I mean, what is the point of having a fancy font if you're the only one who can see it?

    In the end, I had to open the font files in a hex editor and zero the bits manually before re-generating the PDF.
  • ccanni1028, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"I'm sure there are PDF readers on Windows and Linux that don't obey the PDF DRM."

    pdf995 is a pretty good one.
  • shout, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2No kidding. Besides if you're really determined to crack a DRM'd pdf it's not that hard to do other than with Gmail's functionality.
  • Monoboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Doesn't Adobe Reader 7 have a pretty big installer? Isn't it like 20 mb and takes up quite a bit of hard drive space once unpacked?

    I've always been surprised at Acrobat/Reader's disk size especially when software like Foxit comes out and does the main thing people want (to view PDFs) and is a 10th the size.
  • chrisrowe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2How about this soon?

    https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/636/

    Just go to download the PDF in GMail, then when the popup appears hits View as HTML.
    enjoy
  • Universal, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3There's always the 'Download' button...
  • merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Why would you _ever_ click on a link without checking what it links to first?
  • Drahknon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yeah, that bites. I loved that feature... quick and dirty way to preview files.
  • Drahknon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You can print to a PDF from any program, keeping every nuance of the formatting, but also of images. I worked for Xerox for a while and it's the standard for scanning images of documents and moving them about. Perfect copies of any document, every time, in a fairly small format. No images, fonts or anything to worry about.

    Are you going to scan a technical manual with schematics on every page into Word or Open Document? Nope.
  • vtwin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1HTML equivalent to PDF? Lol... kids know so little these days, it's funny, but in sad way...

    These two formats are not even in the same league...

  • rm999, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Probably a reply to this article
    http://www.digg.com/gaming/History_of_Console_Prices:_PS3_Isn_t_The_Highest.
  • BaulZaak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I also used to avoid PDF files at all costs due to the extremely slow loading time for Acrobat on Windows, I would keep Acrobat open in case I wanted to open a second PDF file. Now with Foxit I can shut it down and open another file quicker than most other viewers. Now I just dread DOC format.
  • chembro84, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1How soon can we expect a firefox extension to "give" us back this feature? I use "view as HTML" at least 5 times a week for PDFs.
  • MilitantRabbit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1BOO!
  • aldreneo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What? Its working fine for me...
    http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:PE9OLuKzBXAJ:www.abc-canada.org/fld/downloads/abc_game_instructions_en.pdf+abc+filetype:pdf&hl=en&gl=ca&ct=clnk&cd=2

    http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:K3R1yf8O0HYJ:www.sussex.ac.uk/publications/documents/2.0_typefaces.pdf+abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz+filetype:pdf&hl=en&gl=ca&ct=clnk&cd=6

    http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:WA-hSGjDB6gJ:itextdocs.lowagie.com/tutorial/fonts/StandardType1Fonts.pdf+the+quick+brown+filetype:pdf&hl=en&gl=ca&ct=clnk&cd=5
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