PDF Security - security

I have a question about PDF security preferences. Can I change an editable pdf to readable pdf programmatically?

Yes - with for example PDFStamp on Windows (Command line reference)

My Perl CAM::PDF library has a command-line utility called rewritepdf.pl that can do this quite easily with the -P flag. The library exposes this functionality quite easily, too.

Yes, adding security to a PDF which stops people from being able to edit it, is quite easy using a variety of different PDF toolkits (iText, PDFSharp, Quick PDF Library, etc).

PDF encryption may not be honored in some tools.
You can use tools such as PDFLEO to encrypt PDF documents (command line reference)

Related

Creating custom documents (PDFs) on the fly on a website

I want to create custom documents on my website which is running on a Linux-based server. My website has user login capability to access specific details on the website.
What I want to do is:
Use a default .tex file where the contents of the main document are stored. This would be available on the server (on admin side);
Get few user specific inputs (like login name, the day and date when the request was made), their custom inputs like what specific details they want (this will make it possible to include or exclude few chapters, sections from the document);
Using the inputs received above (in point 2), the document would be customized on the fly on the website by running LaTeX compiler and the output of the compilation would be shared with the user.
My questions are:
Has someone tried this before? Any suggestions, alternatives they can point to? If there is any other better solution than LaTeX, I am open to hear and understand that as well.
Are there any specific settings that we need to do either on the server or on LaTeX installation that will enable doing this?
Any additional packages, programs are required to be installed to get this working?
Any help and insights would be appreciated.
You can generate PDF using appropriate libraries for programming language you use for your back-end. This is definitely safer than injecting user input into TeX file and probably would be faster too.
PHP: Best way to create a PDF with PHP
Ruby: https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn
anything else: google for "$LANGUAGE generate pdf".
The first and the second questions can be done in any programming language you choose while reading the .tex template and add/omit the data, then save it to the temporal .tex file. After compilation yo can remove this file. If you are working with a linux server you can use a service (cron, systemd) to automate the cleaning of files.
To compile and get the file you must use pdflatex command line program, which is the one any LaTeX editor uses. I compile my LaTeX documents this way in linux. I think this way is quite fast, except if you want images in this document, or are using tikz pictures.
I know I am suggesting the old way to do the work, but usually is the best way.
And, finally, I think PHDComics uses something like this for the emergency button (down in the right), only that in the site the pdf is already generated for the specific comic: http://www.phdcomics.com/

How to read info-documentation as pdf?

(Almost) all GNU programs ship info documentation that is viewable with info <topic>. This uses a TUI for displaying the documentation. I dislike this, since it is hardly readable. Given the .texi-files, on can also generate a pdf-file from the documentation, but this makes it neccessary to manually download the source package. Is there a way to generate pdf-documentation from the .info-files?
Please move this question to superuser.com if appropriate.
You could use other readers like tkinfo or pinfo. Or just use your browser going to https://gnu.org/software/program-name. I haven't found nothing to convert info files to pdf.

Converting HTML to odt, doc, docx

Is there an easy way to convert HTML(with CSS styles and embedded images) to ODT, DOCX, DOC from the command line on linux server. I searched a lot but have not found a good option.
There was a problem the same way to convert to PDF, decided by wkhtmltopdf. Perhaps there are ways to convert the resulting PDF documents to other formats?
To convert to odt it's pretty easy after installing pandoc.
After the relatively hard part: from odt (or even html) you can script (Open|Libre)Office via e.g. unoconv
Or you can like:
abiword --to=doc filename.odt
Also see this thread, and this blog post.
HTH
If you want to convert HTML into docx you may use a solution like PHPDocX. You need to get the PRO version though because the free one does not include the conversion functionality.
If you're on ruby there is a gem based on libreoffice headless (with pyod/jod converter) and pdf tools.
Post with your issues to the pandoc GoogleGroup, John is very responsive in every way.
You may even find the latest release v1.9 may fix your problem, or maybe you just need to get to know the toolset in more detail.
I found soultion - is abiword in console variant.

make swf from fla without ever opening it

is it possible to change text and images in a fla file without ever opening it up and then making the swf via command line? I want to make a flash template and save the fla. Then be able to update my text and image name and convert it to swf. I have one template but tons of different text options and background images. It would be nice to be able to copy the master.fla twenty times and just change the source code (will do this from command line) and then convert to swf (via command line).
Any help would be appreciated.
With CS5, you can do half of what you're asking today, by using the XFL file format instead of FLA. Instead of a binary blob, you get an editable XML file and a tree of separate asset files: PNGs, AS3 files, etc. You can then modify the XML or AS3 files programmatically to get your variants.
(A CS5 FLA file is really just a zipped up version of the XFL, but there's no advantage to using that instead of an XFL. In CS4 and previous, FLA was a proprietary binary format.)
The missing piece is an XFL compiler. Adobe currently provides no such thing, and the third party market hasn't yet produced one.
You could use a systems automation tool to drive the Flash Professional environment through the compilation steps. On OS X, for example, either Automator or AppleScript should be able to do what you want. It'll just have more overhead than the command line compiler you were hoping for.
I agree with Jason, there are a lot of alternatives to what you suggest. Keeping content out of the SWF is good practice actually. This is a good way to avoid large files!
Depending on what you 're looking to achieve, there are a lot of solutions available. XML is an option, JSON another.
If you're looking to build a template, any of the above would seem appropriate.
It sounds like you're working from the Flash IDE, as Jason suggests you may want to have a look at another IDE, such as FlashDevelop, FDT or FlashBuilder as they make coding with AS3 a lot easier.

xls to text converter

Anyone know of a free xls to text converter that can be run from the unix command line?
There is also the package catdoc (Ubuntu link) that includes a xls2csv utility.
A quick search of apt-cache turned up the Ubuntu package python-excelerator for excelerator, which includes py_xls2html, py_xls2csv and py_xls2txt utlities. Will this work for you?
Your question reminded me of anti-word. I looked up and found anti-excel. I have never used it, so I can't vouch for how well it work or whether it makes achievable the task you have at hand. Also, I remember using a utility called 'sc' on linux to created spreadsheets on the console---though, I do not know whether it is capable of interpreting XLS files.
I think gnumeric is better to convert document to csv http://xmodulo.com/2012/06/how-to-convert-xlsx-files-to-xls-or-csv.html

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