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To: Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid>
cc: python-list@python.org, lac@openend.se
From: Laura Creighton <lac@openend.se>
Subject: Re: Can I copy/paste Python code?
In-Reply-To: Message from Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> of "Wed, 22 Jul 2015 13:54:22 -0000." <moo7ae$bpn$2@reader1.panix.com>
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In a message of Wed, 22 Jul 2015 13:54:22 -0000, Grant Edwards writes:
>On 2015-07-22, Laura Creighton <lac@openend.se> wrote:
>
>> She's absolutely stuck with the font choices somebody
>> else made for everybody,
>
>Once again, that is the whole _point_ of PDF.
>
>> and they aren't right for her.
>
>> And this is way it is with the bulk of problems I end up having
>> to deal with from people who get pdfs and have problems reading
>> them --  what they want to do is outside of the range of what
>> they are allowed to do.
>
>The entire purpose of PDF is to prevent people from changing the
>format and appearance of documents.
>
>-- 
>Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I hope I bought the
>                                  at               right relish ... zzzzzzzzz
>                              gmail.com            ...
>-- 

My problem isn't that I don't understand this, my problem is that I
think this is, in nearly all cases, morally the wrong thing to do. And
very often not what the document creator wanted in the first place --
they are using 'the Portable Document Format' because they expect it
to be readable by everybody.

And the upshot of this is that people send me PDFs that they cannot
use for some reason, and I get out reportlab and hack the PDF to be
something they can use, and send it back to them -- which I can pretty
much always do, unless the PDF uses a lot of bitmaps.

So this means that producing a reader that could do exactly what I do
is well within the abilities of Adobe.  But people who aren't as
technologically sophisticated as I am, or who don't have access to
such a person have to suffer.  This is not a tehcnical limitation,
but a political one.

Should Adobe get hit with a ton of lawsuits from disabled people
claiming unfair discrimination, they could change this policy
overnight.  Have the possibility of unchanging documents for the
very rare times when that is wanted and indeed needed, and the
rest of the time let the readers look at their docs any way they like.

Laura