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Background
Using LaTeX to write a book. When a user purchases the book, the PDF will be generated automatically.
Problem
The PDF should have a watermark that includes the person's name and contact information.
Question
What software meets the following criteria:
- Applies encrypted, invisible watermarks to a PDF
- Open Source
- Platform independent (Linux, Windows)
- Fast (marks a 200 page PDF in under 1 second)
- Batch processing (exclusively command-line driven)
- Collusion-attack resistant
- Non-fragile (e.g., PDF -> EPS -> PDF still contains the watermark)
- Well documented (shows example usages)
Ideas & Resources
Some thoughts and findings:
- Natural language processing (NLP) watermarks.
- Apply steganography on a randomly selected image.
- http://openstego.sourceforge.net/cmdline.html
The problem with NLP is that grammatical errors can be introduced. The problem with steganography is that the images are sourced from an image cache, and so recreating that cache with watermarked images will impart a delay when generating the PDF (I could just delete one image from the cache, but that's not an elegant solution).
Thank you!
Please modify your description of the requirements a bit, otherwise they are unclear. "undetectable watermarks" clearly are not what you want... otherwise, how would you yourself detect them if you needed to? – Kurt Pfeifle – 2010-12-26T12:28:59.920
It is a bit unclear what exactly the purpose of your conceived system is: Detect if the PDF is passed along to another user, even though your license does forbid this? Detect if the PDF is printed on paper, even though your license does forbid this? Track the way of a particular PDF through the internet and track when it's opened? Or something else? – Kurt Pfeifle – 2010-12-26T13:45:43.680
@pipitas: If a registered version of the PDF is released, without permission, into the wild, I would like to know who released it. But if people can see that the PDF has a watermark, then the watermark becomes that much easier to circumvent. – Dave Jarvis – 2010-12-26T16:08:01.553