drewdan Posted March 12, 2014 Share Posted March 12, 2014 Hi All, I have a question for you all. My client would like a component developed for Joomla that will allow them to upload PDF magazines to the website and then it be output on the PDF in a secure format so they cannot be downloaded or copied. Does anyone know of an open source solution that might enable me to do this. The requirement is that this not be made using flash so that it will work on iOS devices. There are two ways I can see this working, either when the PDF is uploaded it gets converted into a different format so it can simply be integrated into the page when output, or the PDF gets uploaded as it, and it output in some wrapper that will protect it, im really not quite sure, you any advice will be great! Thanks for your help! I look forward to hearing your responses. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psycho Posted March 12, 2014 Share Posted March 12, 2014 Can't be done. Anything the user is viewing in their browser has been downloaded to their machine/device. You can put a lot if time and effort into obfuscating and disabling features (like right-click menu) but at the end of the day the content is sitting their in the user's cache. And, for the user that doesn't know where the cache is they can simply take a screenshot of any content they want to share. The only thing that makes sense is to prevent users from passing off content as their own through watermarking. But, if this is a PDF and the "text" is the content you want to protect, well that's pointless. Sure, you can make it so the user can't easily copy the text off the PDF by how you create it, but there's nothing to prevent someone from having the content re-keyed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
drewdan Posted March 12, 2014 Author Share Posted March 12, 2014 (edited) Hi Psycho, Thanks for the quick response, the majority of the users of this website will not be tech savvy, so hopefully there wont be much risk involved. I think the best scenario is to make it as difficult as possible for the user to gain access and download the PDF, my customer does not want watermarking or anything like, so I think I will have to get creative! Thanks for your help! Edited March 12, 2014 by drewdan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gizmola Posted March 13, 2014 Share Posted March 13, 2014 drewdan, I think you're missing the point Psycho was making. A pdf is by its nature, downloadable. There is no way for it not to be downloadable. The pdf gets displayed by whatever handler the user has in the browser or operating system but before that happens, the full contents of the pdf are downloaded from the host site to the client. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
drewdan Posted March 22, 2014 Author Share Posted March 22, 2014 Hey there, slow reply I know. I was not missing the point, I understand that it is downloadable. What I meant was I would look for a way to make it more difficult to download the PDF. My thought so far is to convert the PDF into JPG images. This means I can put them on the page and use jQuery to create a navigation system to "turn the page" I would then have a transparent div over the top of the jpg so if anyone tried to right click and save the image they would just get a empty transparent gif. I would also implement some hotlink protection too. Of course the images would still be downloaded into the cache and anyone who viewed the source code could find the location of the image to download it, but it would be a little more difficult to do! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psycho Posted March 22, 2014 Share Posted March 22, 2014 Or they could simply use the snipping tool that is built into windows to copy the image. The bottom line is that you can take many, many hours to add a bunch of hacks to try and prevent users from "copying" the content. But, what is the result? You can't prevent it to any certainty. Plus, all these measures you might implement will add to the potential for bugs, misalignment of the pages, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
drewdan Posted March 23, 2014 Author Share Posted March 23, 2014 Cheers for the info, I will relay it back to my client and let them know Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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