How do you prevent editing of word documents?
 

That you upload to the internet.

I mean like you can access someone else's work and then you can save it again, is there anyway to protect against this?

Thanks.

usually as long as there is text.. you can copy and paste it..

Umm... in order to read it, you have to download it. And if you download it, you've already "saved" it...

You can't.
Save or convert the file to a pdf to avoid this problem. This is in fact the reason Adobe invented the .pdf. To keep important documents distributed digitally from being edited.

If you do not own a pdf conversion program or adobe software, there are several good websites that allow you to submit a .doc or .txt file and spit the document back at you as a .pdf
HTH

If you have the full version of adobe, you can alter pretty much whatever you want as far as text is concerned.

Not if the author has locked the document or added a watermark. While cracking a .pdf can be done, a .pdf that has been locked in adobe acrobat by the author and then saved and watermarked is 99.9% secure.
There will always be a pimple faced leet AOL kid somewhere who wants to prove that he can "hack" and will say "see i can crack the security on a .pdf!" but it keeps the other 99% of users from bothering. make it require effort and most if not all will get the point.
(as a side note, you can encrypt a .pdf with blowfish, for which there is no ability to crack, but only uncle sam has any reason to even bother to use that feature.)

if you need a pdf publishing program and can't afford the full version of acrobat, i suggest you use <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/">pdf creator</a>. it's opensource and free. i use it and it works well.

You mean if someone downloads your work, edits it, and then saves it on THERE computer?

Or do you mean them download your work, edit it, and save it to your hosting space, therefore overwriting your original work?

The latter isn't really possible. Unless they got into your FTP account..........and I don't think that's what you're talking about.

I use some software called pdf995, its a printer driver, that prints any document you want to pdf. when u select the pdf printer it just brings up a "save as" box and an advert, but it works great!

http://www.pdf995.com/

Re: How do you prevent editing of word documents?
 

What would you ever possibly want to do this for? What purpose does it serve?

Can you point out an example PDF? I'd think I could use pdf2ps on linux to convert it to postscript, then use ps2pdf to convert it back, after editing the postscript.