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CVu Journal Vol 13, #1 - Feb 2001 + Letters to the Editor
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Title: Your Letters - The Editor's Replies

Author: 

Date: 08 February 2001 13:15:42 +00:00 or Thu, 08 February 2001 13:15:42 +00:00

Summary: 

A project

Body: 

Dear Mr. Glassborow

I have a project that I hope either you or one of your programming colleagues might help me with. As you know my company is a commercial printer that is moving towards digitally produced books in short runs. Towards this end I would like a printer driver written just to create files for me.

Specifications for the driver (all I can think of anyway) are as follows:

  1. To work on PC's, in Windows. Working in NT as well would be nice but not essential.

  2. To be easy to install, with a minimum of options.

  3. To offer print to file only.

  4. To offer A5 or A4 pages only, no crop marks and no bleeds.

  5. To create PDF files.

  6. To allow my customer to view the PDF files, but to encrypt them so they will not print.

  7. and, of course, to provide me with a decryption tool to allow me to print them.

The aim of this is to allow my customers working in MSWord, Publisher, Pagemaker etc. etc. to print to files and be able to see before printing where their line/column/page breaks are and to compress them to a size making email attachments possible.

Is this possible, within the constraints of a small to medium sized company's budget, and within copyright as far as whoever owns the PDF format?

Do feel free to publish this as a lesson in what is missing from a customer's brief. If at all possible it is a project I would like to proceed with. Thank you again for your help.

Yours sincerely, Kevin Tomes

Now I hope that this is something that one or more of you can get your teeth into. If you would be interested please contact Kevin. If you just have general comments on the feasibility, still send them to him. PLEASE copy all email to me so that I can keep track of how things develop.

Now I can think of all kinds of problems with the specs as given, not least the intellectual property rights associated with generating PDF files, so I think the first stage is determining what the customer needs rather than what he thinks he needs.

Notes: 

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