Read only FAQ's

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You'd have to define what you meant by "came across". My guess is
that either you or your software got temporarily confused.

The answer to your question, if you really mean to ask the question
"Can I post an FAQ to Usenet such that the vast majority of people
cannot print/save/cut-and-paste it?" is no, there is no established
way of doing so. If you've sent the bits out, then in theory you
can't really prevent me from doing whatever I feel like with the bits
using *MY* news reader software.[*]

A rather pertinent question for this mailing list is why you feel the
need to apply such "protection" to your posting.

--
Yours in Leadership, Friendship, and Service,
Ping Huang (INTERNET: pshuang@mit.edu), probably speaking for himself

[*] There are some situations which you could almost consider an
exception to the above statement that "you can't prevent me from doing
whatever I feel like with the bits".  For example, I remember reading
a review for software which allows you to distribute richly formatted
documents --- a well known example would be Adobe's Acrobat, but there
are a number of other companies with similar products.  Some of these
products tout as a feature that you can create essentially read-only
documents which the reader cannot easily copy text or graphics from
the documents (most of them didn't tout as a feature preventing the
reader from printing your document as a whole).  However, unless you
wanted to limit the audience to those people who have such software
already, or unless you wanted to distribute document viewer software
along with your FAQ document (but, not all viewers are freely
distributable, and you would have to provide viewers for multiple
platforms, and not all platforms are supported...), this doesn't help
you.  And I would bet such software is really only relying on security
by obscurity anyway; i.e., if I wanted to strongly enough, I could
reverse-engineer the file formats without too much trouble and extract
the text and graphics.  Or, I could use software to capture the image
from the document viewer's window in a GUI environment and then OCR
it, etc.  However, you would have succeeded in preventing most normal
:) people from doing anything with your FAQ other than read it.

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