Handling PDF documents on the web: watermarks, print access, etc.

[BuildMyWeb]

I have a client that wants to provide pdf documents to their paying members only.  They do not want these pdf documents redistributed, copied, printed, etc.  I explained that to the best of my knowledge, there is no way to prevent redistribution once the user views the document.  You can mitigate, but not stop 100%.  So the steps they would like to take are:

 

1. to have a custom watermark on each page of a multi-page pdf booklet.  basically the Users account credentials on our local database would be used as textual data to overlay on each page.

2. to deter replication of the document contents.  I believe there is software that can convert pdf fonts/content to graphic files and/or flash elements to prevent copy-n-paste.

3. the solution has to be PHP based.

 

there are thousands of pages so we, of course, do not want to do the above manually. 

[scootstah]

If you let your users view it, there is no way to prevent them from copying it. Even if you convert it to an image there are OCR tools which can just convert it right back to text.

[BuildMyWeb]

If you let your users view it, there is no way to prevent them from copying it. Even if you convert it to an image there are OCR tools which can just convert it right back to text.

 

thx scoots.  i understand this.  i spoke about it in my initial post.  but the client would still like to DETER the average user.  these paying members are educators, not developers.  chances are they are not familiar with OCR tools.  operative word here is 'deter', not 'prevent'.

[maxxd]

There are several PDF libraries for php, most of which handle everything you're wanting to do. I've used mPDF in the past and it does allow watermarking, font embedding, etc. - I'm not sure it's the most up-to-date library out there, but I know it worked well when I used it about a year or so ago.