Re[2]: Editable PDFs

[Bill Troop billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

> Bottom line: Whoever can read a pdf-file can also copy, print, edit and
> redistribute it. ...Whoever can
> read a pdf-file can also transcribe it and redistribute the transcription.)
They can also -- a matter which has come to concern typeface designers
greatly -- extract the fonts and re-use and redistribute them.
For this reason, the Monotype and Linotype fonts now sold by Adobe (for
instance in the new version of Font Folio) are not embeddable. This could
wreak havoc among graphic artists who routinely embed fonts in pdf
documents. If will also wreak havoc with the main body of users who will
gradually discover, when they use newer fonts with newer apps, that many of
the fonts they want to use cannot be embedded in pdfs.
This unwelcome development does, however, represent a necessary response by
the font industry. We have seen how file sharing has led, in the past two
years, to a 25% decrease in sales of CDs. But the font industry, the victim
of file sharing for a much greater period, has seen sales declines that are
closer to 90% over the past few years.
Unfortunately, the model that has been so successful for so many years with
so many software applications -- "the more pirated copies you have out
there, the more legitimate users you have" -- doesn't work with fonts. This
has all been very sad to watch, particularly for people (like me) who once
believed it was possible to make a reasonable living designing typefaces.
This is all a very small part of a very large trend: the software industry
knows that introducing blanket copy protection is lethal for sales. So what
is happening is the slow, slow, slow introduction of a number of very small
inconveniences -- digital signatures amongst them -- that are expected to
lead up, over the next few years or even decades, to effective copy protection.