It is possible to make the text rather obscure, but that doesn't mean that if formatted correctly you could not scan through the file in a text editor and read it. Granted, it's rarely done, but doesn't mean it's impossible.
I just ran strings(1) across about 40 of the PDFs I have here from various clients, online resources and PDFs I've created in Windows and with OpenOffice.org, and not a single one contained any readible strings that are actually in the _content_ of the documents themselves, other than the strings which comprise URLs embedded in the document itself. So where is the text of the document stored? If its somewhere in here, why is it obfuscated by default, in every single PDF I have? The document content itself is most-definitely NOT stored as "plain text" in the pdf documents I have here, which is a pretty broad sample set. David A. Desrosiers desrod@gnu-designs.com http://gnu-designs.com