Protecting PDF drawings from AC18

[Anonymous]

Hi,

So a question we are currently facing in the office with Archicad's latest PDF importing/exploding capabilities is that is it a bit too good at what it does. I'm sure most of your drawings go to a public database for council as ours do (saved as PDFs). What we are concerned about is the ability of other practices to now easily "rip" a pdf for a very good base model and undercut a fee for the next stage of the job with the client.. Hence losing work and not ensuring a frustrating remodelling process for the other firm. We have tried Acrobat encryption which archicad manages to get around, and flattening the PDF to a raster file makes it too big for online submission....

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

[DGSketcher]

I think its fair to say that a lot of CAD users including your own office will have at some point accessed such files, protected or not, for possibly genuine reasons. AC's excellent PDF conversion isn't really the issue as you can still trace the original from vector or raster PDFs or even TIFFs and what you are asking is probably impossible to implement as you are effectively saying the drawings which are a matter of public record should be unreadable unless you have the permission of the author.

Perhaps the ideal solution is to try and give your client best value so they don't go elsewhere for the next stage!

[Anonymous]

I had considered this too, drawings were always able to be copied by tracing etc, the only difference is that now it is quicker & easier.
Other programs have had the ability to explode or snap to pdf long before AC joined in.