Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
The PDF versions of O'Reilly's ebooks have your name embedded on each page to discourage people from making them available to other people. ... I really can't imagine someone putting such a PDF up for everyone to access.
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It's possible to get around that. I've got several PDFs like that; Wowio's downloads have your name on the first page & account # on every page, and many of the drivethrustuff.com PDFs are watermarked with name on the bottom of every page.
I like to edit my PDFs. I crop out the whitespace; I copy & paste sections of the text in to Word files to print booklets for my kids; I mash charts together to make reference pages. I don't want my account number getting in the way of that.
I remove the lock on the PDF and use Acrobat's Touchup Object tool to remove the annoying line of text. I have to go page-by-page to remove it, but it's only a couple of minutes for a very large book.
I don't think it's likely this is done by a lot of ebook pirates; it's amazingly monotonous work that requires expensive software (Acrobat Pro; the lock removal software is $10). But it's certainly possible, even if most people would probably find it easier to convert the PDF to jpgs, batch-crop those to remove the id info, recombine into PDF & run them through an OCR program.