Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 19:58:37 -0700 (PDT) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Cc: Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com>, current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: [Fwd: Acrobat Reader 3.0 Beta for Linux! (fwd)] Message-ID: <Pine.AUX.3.94.960926195150.12329B-100000@covina> In-Reply-To: <199609270114.KAA17129@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
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On Fri, 27 Sep 1996, Michael Smith wrote: > Julian Elischer stands accused of saying: > > > > I saw this on c.o.l.a. Now you can read encrypted pdf file on FreeBSD > > via Linux emulation. I installed it on crab and it seems to work fine > > as long as you have the required shared libs for linux. I'd like to comment: Notice the wording in the announcement and on Adobe's Web page which says it _only_ has been tested on Yggdrasil Fall edition. Does that give you an indication how _afraid_ commercial authors are of claiming support for the divergent varieties of Linux distributions out there that they haven't tested? Having a single distribution of FreeBSD has always been a _big_ win for us, IMHO. However the fact that FreeBSD runs a variety of different Linux versions and is nowhere near 100% compatible from a userland perspective, implies that the differences between the various Linux flavors are unlikely to cause programs like Acrobat Reader much trouble. Therefore it appears that commercial vendors only "support" a single Linux flavor for political, rather than technical reasons.... > It has been possible to read encrypted PDF files on FreeBSD using ghostscript > and gv or ghostview for quite some time now. It would be nice if apsfilter > recognised PDF so that one could just print the junk rather than having to > translate it first. I was not aware of this... (blatant plug: right now I'm maintaining a Ghostscript distribution for BeOS, see www.be.com for more info). > (Note that due to the interesting american laws regarding encryption > technology, the PDF decoding code isn't included in the stock gs release. > I wonder how Adobe get around this...) I've heard that if you _only_ do decryption, you can apply for an export permit. As long as your program can't be used to encrypt anything. Silly law, really... -- Jake
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