The document has been delivered using the British Library's FileOpen service. The software installation is, naturally, the tricky bit.
I've so far received a total of three emails and instructions to read many documents, install software and fill out forms. However, this is the first time I've used the British system (as opposed to systems in the US) and it is proving far from straightforward. The library asked me if electronic was OK and I agreed as this has always worked well for me in the past. I opened ~/ghostscript-8.15/lib/gs_pdfwr.I just requested an interlibrary loan. With this, I had a fully-functioning Ghostscript system in my home directory that was ready for the Linux Forums hack. I downloaded and expanded the source code into a ghostscript-8.15 directory in my home folder, then built it using cd ~/ghostscript-8.15 I’ve learned that it won’t work with the latest Ghostscript, but will work with version 8.15, which is still available from SourceForge. The hack involves Ghostscript and its PostScript-to-PDF conversion capabilities. The method depends on a clever hack I learned from this Linux Forums discussion. Ironically, I’m able to fix these files by breaking them further. So with these files even the current version of Reader couldn’t be trusted to open them and keep them open, which means that I just paid for something broken. At some point, either while scrolling through the file or while printing it, Reader would freeze up, giving me the spinning beachball of death, and I’d have to Force Quit the application. The PDFs I bought today caused even more trouble. This is not a theoretical concern it happened to me last year. If I upgrade Reader when Adobe releases a new version, the PDF will think it’s on a new computer and will refuse to open.
The intention of the DRM is to lock the PDF to a single computer, but it ends up locking the file to a particular version of Reader. In a nutshell, the problem is that the PDFs I bought require a copy of Adobe Reader with the FileOpen plugin. Today I had even more trouble with DRM’d PDFs bought from another source, and I’ve decided I won’t be so elliptical in writing about the solution. Next post Previous post Making PDFs usableĪbout a year ago I wrote a post describing, rather elliptically, my troubles with DRM’d PDF files bought from a standards agency and how I generated unencumbered PDFs from them.
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