A minimal PDF
The smallest complete file: a page, and shapes drawn on it.
A document locked with a password
You send out a price list, a report, a set of plans. You want people to read them and print them, and you would rather they did not lift your paragraphs into a document of their own, or change a figure and pass it on. An ordinary PDF gives you no say in any of that: whoever holds the file holds everything in it, in plain sight.
This one holds its own words scrambled. Open it and nothing is asked of you — it reads and prints like any other document. Try to copy from it or edit it, and the reader declines. The page states the author's password, so you can try the other door yourself. And it says plainly what such a file is worth: what a locked document withholds are requests a reader honours, not locks, and a reader that ignores them opens it all the same.
What this example shows
- Every word of the document scrambled until a reader opens it.
- Printing and reading aloud allowed, copying and altering withheld.
- The password that lifts the rest, stated on the page itself.
The code that writes it, in full
Whole programs, hundreds of lines long, for whoever writes your software.
Read the Rust source Read the Python source
The document itself
Examples near this one
Showing page one before the file has arrived
The same document written twice, the ordinary way and with its first page moved to the head of the file, with how much of each a reader must hold before page one appears.
Making the file smaller
The same document written twice, plainly and packed, with what each one weighs and what the packing saved.
Fonts kept inside the file
Text set in a typeface the file carries inside it, cut down to the letters actually used, and still searchable, copyable and readable aloud.
Letters you draw yourself
A tick, a cross and a dash drawn by the program, added to the document as a font, and set among ordinary words.
A page that carries no font
Four faces every reader already draws, set on one page, so the file holds no font at all — and the example weighs the same lines both ways to say what that saves.
Glossary
- request
- One call to the service: you send what the document should say, and get the document back. Your bill counts these calls, one for each document. The number of pages inside a document is never counted.