[pjmlp]

The irony is when I get told that people want an application to output PDF instead of Word, because it is read only.

I always get amused by proving those people how to edit PDFs.

It is the same logic that documents sent by Fax are legally binding but the same document sent by email not.

[Closi]

As someone that does this, it’s because they are harder to change for the average user, and that barrier also means ‘don’t do it’ in a soft sense. If I send a PPT you are almost saying to a client “you can edit this if you want, because I provided it in a format which is designed for editing rather than a format that was designed for view-only”.

99% of the time it stops the “Oh great, so when you took that presentation we prepared for you as a consultancy, you kept our logo on it but changed the content and also removed our caveats!”

Also it stops people seeing my personal notes and comments that I have included throughout the document if it’s a ppt, and it also stops me sharing the data behind any graphs which is normally internally stored in the ppt file. You can set a ppt as view only, but nobody does it and clients don’t like it.

[Cancan82]

Yes - the dangers of sending a PPT to someone are real... your theme, your logo, someone else’s words. Unless a person is setup specifically to edit PDFs, there are limited tools to do so. Change to many words and spacing and alignment gets off. And it’s annoying.

[dharmab]

The right way to do this is via digitally signed PDFs. The signature is invalidated if the document is edited (other than adding a signature).

Disclaimer: I work for Adobe, but not directly on Document Cloud.

[bane]

Wait until you get a PDF which is just a bunch of poorly scanned JPGs and no OCR.

[pjmlp]

That is why one pays for Adobe Acrobat.