iPDF-poppler passworded document - pdf

Note: I am not sure if this is better here, or at superuser, but since it concerns the poppler library, I would assume here, because people here are more likely to know how it works.
Software: iPDF 2.12 + Poppler 2.11 (Last commit 2006-12-12) for Irex Iliad. Sources are here.
Problem Documents: Sciam digital PDFs (any of them, since all are produced the same way).
The document will load fine using Okular, Adobe Reader, and XPDF without requesting any passwords, and can be read without problem.
Loading using iPDF - so poppler - requests a password to open the document.
I have tried bypassing the SecurityHandler:checkEncryption method in Poppler/SecurityHandler.cc, by making it return true. This works, but fails to load the pdf with errors:
Error: Unsupported version/revision (4/4) of Standard security handler
Error (13571568): Unknown compression method in flate stream
Error: Top-level pages object is wrong type (null)
Error: Couldn't read page catalog
(PV_E)PDFCore.cpp:61,open() Open PDF document (èÖ#(èÖ#à failed with error code 2
(PV_E)PDFApp.cpp:185,open() Could not open file!
This suggests that the actual stream is encrypted, which - if true - suggests that okular is somehow bypassing this.
I am aware of people having similar problems on other mobile devices (I found a similar report with a Nexus One).
I do not know enough about how the pdf format works to know whether there is some 'default' password that should be used instead to open (no other permissions needed) the document. Is there?
Is it a case that it is requesting the owner password, when it only needs to use the user password (blank?) to open it?
Else, does anyone know how something like Okular/XPDF would be able to open it without problem?

This turned out to be an issue with the version of poppler being used by the application being too old for the required security handler.
As such, I have started my own project to create a new pdf viewer for my iliad based on the latest (0.14.*) version of poppler which can handle it. Sources here.

Related

TCPDF SetProtection method is not working as expected

I started writing here:
PHP PDF password protection (no open without password)
But I can't add comments due to my reputation here (I'm better on AskUbuntu but I can't take my rep points from there). I also started a bounty there, and if someone will answer here in two days with an acceptable solution, I will award there.
Now, the problem: SetProtection method is not working as expected.
Wanted behaviour: create a protected/encrypted PDF document with TCPDF library so that the document view is always granted to everyone without asking any password, but if one tries to edit, a password is requested.
I use the following syntax:
$pdf->SetProtection(array('modify', 'copy', 'annot-forms', 'fill-forms', 'extract', 'assemble'), null, 'mypwd', 1);
I can open the file with a pdf viewer as expected.
If I try to open the file with Libreoffice Draw, the password is requested (as expected), but I'm able to edit the document BOTH with mypwd (expected) AND giving a blank password (NOT expected).
What is the right syntax, if any, to have pdf readable by everyone BUT editable ONLY with "mypwd" provided?
EDIT:
here you are with a file with a blank user password and a strong master password. Ilovepdf.com finds it UNLOCKED, Libreoffice Draw can edit it.
This is NOT the expected behaviour.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/864p8xjh1ue041z/tracking_12750_16.pdf?dl=0
As far as I can see your example PDF is encrypted just the way you wanted, with an empty user password and a non-empty owner password. Thus, TCPDF does just what it was asked to do.
Most likely the problem is that your expectation is too strong: If a program can open a PDF for reading, that program can do anything with the PDF, no matter how restricted it is configured to be. The permissions and different owner and user roles require the cooperation of the software in question, they are not technically enforced.
This already is clear from the specification:
Once the document has been opened and decrypted successfully, a PDF reader technically has access to the entire contents of the document. There is nothing inherent in PDF encryption that enforces the document permissions specified in the encryption dictionary. PDF readers shall respect the intent of the document creator by restricting user access to an encrypted PDF file according to the permissions contained in the file.
(ISO 32000-2, section 7.6.4 Standard security handler)
Apparently Libreoffice Draw simply does not behave as required by the PDF specification, i.e. it is not properly restricting user access to an encrypted PDF file according to the permissions contained in the file. Probably by design, probably just a programming glitch.
You should simply be aware that your expectation to
create a protected/encrypted PDF document with TCPDF library so that the document view is always granted to everyone without asking any password, but if one tries to edit, a password is requested.
cannot be implemented using standard PDF encryption facilities for arbitrary PDF processors, merely for those that follow the PDF specification requirement quoted above.
There are some providers of PDF DRM software solutions which are not so easy to circumvent, but I doubt any of them can withstand a determined hacker. (Unless the solution in question is not giving the PDF to the user at all but only images in a custom, webservice-based viewer; but this is not your use case.)
Depending on your actual requirements, you might want to investigate into using digital signatures instead of encryption; if your objective is to make sure that any recipient can be sure that he got your document contents and not what someone else edited into it, this appears more apropos.

Print PDF document on client side silently

I have been searching for a few days how to print PDF documents on the client side. I tried some code shown online, but that yielded no result.
On further search, some says Adobe doesn't allow such method, or can't be done because of security issues, etc ...
I have following questions:
Whole scenario of printing PDF on the client side silently and issues related to it.
Any genuine approach to achieve it? OR other alternative?
I need detailed yes or no for my management.

Add a password to PDF files generated by Phantomjs

I've got some server-side node.js code that generates PDF files on request, using phantomJS, and I'm looking for a way to add password protection to the output.
Sadly I haven't found any mention of such an option in phantom, which makes sense because Chrome doesn't provide that either. Alternately I could run some other tool that would take the PDF created by phantom and add password protection to it, but I can't seem to find any that can do exactly that (add a password to an existing file) and that's completely free to use (preferably, non-GPL).
Will be happy for suggestions on how to approach this task. Thanks!
You can use the node-qpdf package to encrypt and decrypt PDFs. It makes use of qpdf. So first you need to convert HTML -> PDF then PDF -> Password Protected PDF.

Adobe API to convert Office documents to PDF

Is there any API available by Adobe that would enable me to convert Office Documents (docx, xlsx, pptx, etc.) files to a PDF file format?
I would prefer to use .NET to do so, but if I have to I can resort to C/C++.
I've already tried using Adobe SDK, but it seems to me it works to automate the Acrobat application instead of giving me access to underlying functionality. If it's possible and anyone would care to give me an example, I'd be very thankful - after many hours googling it I was unable to find a good answer (a lot of samples doing the contrary, though - converting from PDF to Word).
One last thing, I need it to be an library from Adobe. So, PDFCreator, BCL EasyPDF, Aspose.Words/Cells/Slides etc., unfortunately, won't help me.
UPDATE 1:
I decided to ask this question in the forum because, first, I can't believe that Adobe wouldn't have a library to do this; Of course, it may be the case, but it's very strange.
UPDATE 2:
I also looked already into AdobePDFMakerX.Word interface. I tried calling the CreatePDF(string in, string out) interface, but to no avail. It always returns false, and there is no error description that I can use.
want to convert doc file to pdf file using Adobe pdf service api
In short it has two parts:
make a post request ( providing require parameters ) and from header take x-request-id
make a get request ( providing require parameters ) and as responce you will get your pdf documet
it is working fine
Are you sure Aspose.Words didn't work for you? I tested the below code sample and works fine.
string filePdf = #"D:\\Projects\\original.pdf";
string fileDocX = #"D:\\Projects\\New.docx";
Aspose.Words.Document doc = new Aspose.Words.Document(fileDocX);
doc.Save(filePdf, Aspose.Words.SaveFormat.Pdf);

Externally triggering Thunderbird into displaying a wanted message

I would like having a way to trigger Thunderbird, from an external script, into displaying a particular message in a particular folder.
If it were Firefox, say, I would use firefox -new-tab http://some-URL, and an already running Firefox (or a new one if none) would nicely fetch and display URL. But I found no way to do something equivalent with Thunderbird, neither on the Thunderbird site or through existing extensions, and even after some furious Googling around, which I attempted more than once!
One problem, compared to a plain URL, is the need some notation for selecting a message. Short of a better solution, I wrote a script which knows folder:SOME-FOLDER:ORDINAL, and behaves like an extension of xdg-open. My tool inserts a proper prefix and a few .sbd as needed within the SOME-FOLDER part to turn it into an absolute Thunderbird file reference, and ORDINAL picks a message in that folder. My tool then grabs the message, heuristically converts it into HTML file, and then, directs a Web browser to the resulting file (and if :ORDINAL is not given, it processes the whole folder instead, yielding an HTML index and many linked messages).
My current tool helps a bit at saving message references in other documents and efficiently retrieving them later, but I handle a copy of the Thunderbird message, and not the original. So if I want to delete it, refile it in another Thunderbird folder, and do other similar operation, I still have to go to Thunderbird, interactively find my way again to the wanted message before I can handle it, and this, is not efficient. What I'm dreaming of is a way to get rid of all my HTML conversion and browser trickery, but still keep the pseudo-URL paradigm and pseudo xdg-open interface, to directly force Thunderbird into the correct folder, with the wanted message correctly displayed.
In previous email readers I used (Emacs RMAIL and then Gnus, and Mutt as well later), such things could be managed, and I heavily used such capabilities in scripts. I am astonished, surprised, even a bit dismayed, by the apparent weakness of Thunderbird as a scriptable mail reader. Am I missing something evident? Any avenue or suggestion?
François
P.S. Of course, I agree that using ORDINAL is not very clever. It might mean a different message if the folder get some messages added or deleted. This is a lesser bad. A better but potentially heavier notation might use Message-ID values, but then, an index would also be needed to find the Thunderbird folder containing each message.
There seems to be some way to do it since Google Desktop supported it according to this thread - http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=584542. Perhaps try installing Google Desktop and see what kind of hyperlink its using?
I'll add Outlook supports using external hyperlinks using the outlook: naming scheme, for example outlook:Inbox or outlook:0000000007A2379547B0624691F4FB2E5468A0D7642E2000. See http://www.davidtan.org/create-hyperlinks-to-outlook-messages-folders-contacts-events/ for more info.