Hello,

I am looking to make a pdf file generated by LaTeX harder for a computer to parse into plain text. One of my professors publishes all of our works to the internet and I don't want my papers to be "searchable", but I don't want them to be unreadable. Any Suggestions? The paper must be in pdf in the end and any process it goes through, must do a decent job of preserving quality of both text and images.

- Jim Bryan

Forgive me if I mis-understand what you want. You have at least one don't which should be a do in the original post. I am making what at the moment seems like a reasonable assumption about what you mean. Probably I'm totally wrong. :-)

You can make a PDF with images of text instead of actual text, although it won't look anything like as good on a decent display. Also, wanting to publish but wanting your document to not be searchable...? If you think images of text are not searchable, you might be right for another few months or even a year or two, but omni-present OCR is on the way, so I wouldn't recommend counting on your images of text not getting indexed in the near future.

If you don't want people to be able to search your PDFs, don't publish them. Just publish an abstract and keep the PDFs away from search engines.

put an appropiate robots.txt file in the directory with the pdfs in
taht will stop most search engines indexing them

Thank you for your reply. Thats the right track, except that I am not that worried about the security of my document. I don't expect my pdf to be completely impossible to parse into plain text, but I just want someone to have to go an extra step to do it.

On another side note, I want the images to stay as images, I didn't expect them to be translated into ASCII text to anything. Thank you.

- Jim

dasy2k1,

I don't have access to the webserver, I can only control the pdf I submit.

- Jim

Well one way to do it is by using imagemagick 'convert'. You could take the original PDF, batch convert each page into a png (whether directly or via postscript (I dunno if convert will handle pdf's directly, you may need pdf2ps). Then just do the reverse. As long as you take it to a bitmap style file format, you'll loose the ascii data.However, it will either make the file huge, or it'll look bad when you zoom in (depends on the resolution). Why are you wanting to do this anyway? Surely you want people to be able to search your documents.

To make it hard for plagiarism software checks? Big Uni's use them now............

actually it is to prevent the plagerism check software from archiving my document. I don't mind that it is readable by people, but I don't like that it is publically searchable by the bots.

I've used convert a lot before, I will try that. The problem is that TeX doesn't allow you to just print certain pages out to file.

- Jim

Dayummmm, I'm good......Good Luck.