Yes, well that's well said and I thank you both for taking the trouble to say it.
I've never seen it said so clearly. Certainly never by Adobe (not that I spend much time reading Adobe ads I hasten to add).
It is what I thought was the case, though.
But I persevere with looking for 'decoders' because
(a) I need to - I'm in business as an agent, sure the vendor and buyer would love to cut me out and convey their names and addresses to each other before paying me for my services but that's not what I'm going to let happen, they'll know each other soon enough and I'll be out of the loop.
(a).1 Of course I don't absolutely 'need to' - I could rewrite these spec sheets and product lists but that's very labour intensive, I naturally try to avoid it. But can't always.
(b) There's many coding schemes and most include a decoding method. Even .pdf (which in fact is not proprietory to adobe) as witness the decoder I've got, what is it, 'solid decoder' or something.
Given the vagueness (to me at least) of adobe's publicity concerning their products and their functions I wasn't to know that this function wasn't clearly and simply available right there on some menu choice, even if three deep or something.
It's interesting to note that New Scientist recently reported that the SHA algorithm has been compromised. Now there's a turn up for you.
I now have a better take on the whole thing - thanks in large part to your unequivocal statement of the purpose of .pdf and I can see how, given that it is an image file and not any kind of text or word processor file, you can make such a file from absolutely any concatenation of text and pictures with a bewildering multitude of fonts and kernings and borders and ornaments and that picture would be simply impossible to 'decode' under ordinary circumstances.
So my search is finished. I really never did need much more than the ability to cut things out. I could at any time have taken a picture myself of that picture (the pdf) and edited the picture and forwarded the edited pic. That, then, would not be a pdf file and I worried about that.
But what's to worry? Even if it were a pdf I forwarded the recipient couldn't do anything with it anyway - that's not what it is for. So my .jpg or .gif is just as good.
Except it betrays that it is not the original. Well, everyone knows that in my business and expects it and doesn't care.
So that's the route I'll take in future and have it done in a trice. Convert the .pdf to a picture and edit the picture and forward it.
100% successful. Where conversion programmes such as the one I've got will make mistakes with difficult print, formulae and whatnot.
regards,
ab
