Saturday, December 18, 2010

How to create a .wwf file (without that driver)

OpenOffice.org
Anyone with OpenOffice.org can make .wwf files without any additional software. Simply choose: File/Export as PDF. Then turn to the Security tab. Fill in a "permissions" password and disable printing:



Generate your file as usual. Finally, rename it to .wwf.

Windows
You can make .wwf files by installing the PDF toolkit. Generate your PDF file as usual. Then open a DOS window and issue:
pdftk myfile.pdf output myfile.wwf owner_pw secret allow CopyContents

For those who don't like to use the CLI, you can download my .wwf toolkit. The installation manual is here.

Linux
You can make .wwf files by installing the PDF toolkit, but note that it is included in most distributions as well (pdftk). Generate your PDF file as usual. Then open a console and issue:
pdftk myfile.pdf output myfile.wwf owner_pw secret allow CopyContents

For those who don't like to use the CLI, you can download my .wwf toolkit.

OS/X 10.6 and above
You can make .wwf files by installing the PDF toolkit. Generate your PDF file as usual. Then open a console and issue:
pdftk myfile.pdf output myfile.wwf owner_pw secret allow CopyContents

There have also been unconfirmed reports that you can create an "unprintable" PDF file by using the standard OS/X PDF printer and simply change the security settings. Makes you wonder why the WWF brought out an OS/X version in the first place..

The .wwf toolkit can probably be ported to OS/X as well. If you want to help, please leave a message in the comments.

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