April 07, 2005

Flash ignores PDF Master password/encryption settings?

Perhaps this is commonly known and I missed the memo, but thought I would post to see if anyone had more information.

I was working with some PDF docs today from which I needed to extract vector logo data to use in a Flash project. When I attempted to open the file in Illustrator, I was confronted with the Password entry panel. Not having the pass, I thought I should try a few more apps and continued to fail in importing or opening in Acrobat, Freehand and Photoshop.

As a last ditch effort, I thought I would try to import directly into Flash. Much to my surprise, I was able to import each page of the document, fully layered and editable….

Perhaps the PDF docs were old and using 24-bit encryption (unlike the newer 128-bit) but regardless, I would think Adobe would not be pleased...

Can anyone out there enlighten me on this?

Posted by Kris at April 7, 2005 09:57 PM
　



Comments

i got the same problem for pdf documents protected from copy&paste.
Have a look to my blog :
http://casario.blogs.com/mmworld/2005/04/flashpaper2_all.html

bye

Posted by: Marco Casario at April 7, 2005 11:29 PM

Hmm, I'll have to check more on the specifics with Flash, but I do have some general background. Acrobat PDF files offer a "protect" bit, similar to the "Don't import" bit you can set in a SWF file. Other applications are requested to respect this setting, but still, it's just a request.

This was the essence of that "Free Dmitry" case a few years back... a company offered a tool so that locked PDFs could be edited again, and one of their programmers was captured and brought to court. But meanwhile, PostScript parsers like GhostScript read PDF without heeding that permissions request.

Acrobat offers multiple levels of permissions -- you can set it to not open, not copy, not change -- it may be that the Macromedia Flash MX 2004 authoring tool respects some-but-not-all of those requests.

Lots of the Macromedia folks will be at FlashForward today, and that "flash cookies" story is keeping me pretty busy this week, but I'll ask around, see if I can get more info from someone closer to this feature than me.

jd/mm

Posted by: John Dowdell at April 8, 2005 12:47 AM

The password protection is used I think mainly for Acrobat. PDF's typically are liked by IT and business analysts because they can send out the docs, and lower level managers can't "add their 2 cents."...unless they have Acrobat. Password protecting it makes this go away.

It is VERY interesting that Illustrator actually asked you for your password... does Photoshop do the same?

Anwyay, my point is, the password is for those who own Acrobat mostly, not those of us in the business of creating and editing digital media content.

Posted by: JesterXL at April 8, 2005 02:21 AM

>It is VERY interesting that Illustrator actually asked you for your password... does Photoshop do the same?

The security features in Acrobat are respected by most graphic and layout applications, which is why I was surprised Flash worked. Photoshop and Illustrator ask for a password. Freehand gives an error, stating the document is encrypted and cannot be imported.

Generally the security features will stop you from using the files, unless you have one of the multitude of rather dubious apps made to strip the password and encryption features out of a PDF.

Posted by: Kris at April 8, 2005 04:59 AM

Well, not surprising that Adobe PhotoShop and Adobe Illustrator respect the password settings of Adobe Acrobat.

Your point about "stopping people adding their 2 cents" may well be valid, but Adobe certainly markets their PDF format with 128-bit encryption as being "special" because it's so secure, so I thought it was amusing when I too discovered that Flash reads right past it. Obviously the implementation is far from secure.

Now that Adobe owns Macromedia, I suspect that going forward Flash will repsect PDF "security". It's all just a way to slow copying anyway, as any page can be 99% replicated in an hour or less with a screencap, OCR software and Quark. Ripping in Flash just saves a little time.

Posted by: Robin at May 7, 2005 03:29 AM