Re: Office/Word not a good tool for read-only emailed docs?

From: Suzanne S. Barnhill (sbarnhill_at_mvps.org)
Date: 06/10/04 

Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 21:25:42 -0500

Well, you choose Word because you can't (practically) *create* documents in
Acrobat. 

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
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"tony" <tonySPAMGUARDnews@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:#k8x56oTEHA.3872@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
>
> "Jay Freedman" <jay.freedman@verizon.net> wrote in message
> news:drdfc0tiipdjf6hr4mlbr9tijeikriruj7@4ax.com...
> > Hi Tony
> >
> > This topic is often discussed in the newsgroups.
> >
> > You're correct... sort of. Word was always designed to be an *editor*
> > -- a program for creating and modifying documents. Any efforts to make
> > Word documents uneditable are really fighting the nature if the thing.
> >
> > PDF was designed as a display/print format. Unless you have the full
> > Acrobat authoring program, it is (or was, until recently) fairly hard
> > to modify an existing PDF file. There are now a number of programs,
> > mostly optical character recognition (OCR), that can easily turn a PDF
> > file into a Word file, making PDF considerably less secure than you
> > think. And it was always possibly to print the PDF and then scan/OCR
> > the paper copy.
> >
> > The rule to remember is "if I can read your document, I can alter it."
> > The only electronic document that's really safe from tampering is the
> > one you never send to anyone. If it's a matter of legal proof, use
> > paper or escrow the documents with a third party.
>
> So you're saying that the following scenario cannot be had:
>
> I create a contract of some sort, protect it, email it to a client, have
them
> print it out, sign it and send it back to me via snail mail. I have no way
of
> knowing if an "or" was changed to "and" somewhere in the document by
> any means available. OK, understood.
>
> But what if I just wanted it to be NOT SO EASY to exploit? Couldn't it
> be made much more simpler than IRM? What does IRM get me that
> some kind of password read-only protection couldn't get me? The problem
> with "read-only" in Word is that it's still copyable and saveable,
especially
> form fields are hard to protect. Why can't MS implement real read-only
> where no caret would even show up in the doc and no cut-n-paste or save
> as another file would be allowed without the password? Isn't this very
> fundamental (sending a contract or other document to someone outside
> of the company!)? I just don't understand why it has to be so difficult
and
> so imposing on authors and recipients (I need a service to send a
read-only
> doc or receive one? Ouch!).
>
> I'm trying to give a client of mine this functionality and am now looking
at
> conversion to PDF via a print driver as a simpler solution than IRM to
> get read-only functionality. If I would have known this would become an
> issue, I may have chosen Acrobat to begin with rather than Word.
> Certainly I'm going to be asked by the client why I selected Word in the
> first place if we end up converting to PDF in then end.
>
> Tony
>
> >
> > "tony" <tonySPAMGUARDnews@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> >
> > >I'm wondering if .pdf would be better. That's what the government
> > >uses mostly it seems. Word docs are too difficult to protect (make
> > >read-only): requires IRM which requires Server 2003 or passport
> > >accounts for recipients and browser client and doubles file size.
> > >Does it really take that much technology to make a doc readonly??!!
> > >
> > >Is PDF the simpler solution to sending protected documents
> > >outside of a company (to clients, for example: contracts)?
> > >
> > >Tony
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Regards,
> > Jay Freedman
> > Microsoft Word MVP        FAQ: http://www.mvps.org/word
>
>

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