non standard PDF? [was: Re: Ubuntu's not GNU/Linux?]

Sam Liddicott sam at liddicott.com
Tue Apr 20 07:38:18 UTC 2010


On Tue, 2010-04-20 at 08:01 +0100, Theo Schmidt wrote:

> Matthias-Christian Ott schrieb:
> > Despite this, I've never found a PDF document that didn't work with
> > xpdf or evince.
> 
> How about this one:
> http://www.skppsc.ch/1/downloads/de/Betrugspraevention_www.den-trick-kenne-ich.ch.pdf
> 
> I'm not able to open this with any of my PDF readers, not even xpdf. It doesn't 
> appear to be DRMed, just somehow prgrammed not to open without the required 
> Adobe reader. My usual trick of using pdf2ps doesn't work either, it is the 
> first PDF I've not been able to view without resorting to Adobe reader. Or am I 
> doing something wrong?
> 
> This is strange, as it comes from a semi-official website
> http://den-trick-kenne-ich.ch/4/de/ from the combined police departments of the 
> Swiss kantons.



Wow, produced by: Acrobat Distiller 8.1.0 (Windows) - why would they
want to do that? Maybe they were falling behind on their yearly CIA
quota of machines made hackable via vulnerabilities in the adobe reader.

I found that I can load it into inkscape (I guess using pstoedit) a page
at a time and remove the on-top shapes (not that I'd want to do that for
the whole document).

Sam
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