[Richard]

This may seem an unusual request! I have Word documents that need to be
viewable through our network but CANNOT be printed. Has anyone ever had such
a need?

[Pop`]

Richard wrote:
This may seem an unusual request! I have Word documents that need to
be viewable through our network but CANNOT be printed. Has anyone
ever had such a need?

Not AFAIK. Anything that can be displayed can be printed, even if it's just
a Print Screen. Basically, if you can see it you can print it.
I suppose some printer-side script could be used to intervene and prevent
any spooling to the printer based on something in the print-code, but I've
never heard of it being available; you might have to write the code
yourself.

IMO, if you don't want it printed, don't put it on a screen; what's the
difference, really? You would make the path only available on some
machines, and then take away the print abilities from those machines, but
.... that's not very foolproof.

[Jezebel]

It's a fairly common request: just check the forum archive. And the answer
is always the same. Can't be done.

You can output the documents to PDF and set the security, in Acrobat, to
prevent printing: that will work (sort of) if you also control software
installation on your network, to prevent users installing one of the Acrobat
clones (some of which don't respect document security settings). It still
doesn't prevent the PrintScreen method.

You can put a watermark in the document, such as a big word in half-tone red
across the middle of the page. It's not too distracting on screen, but will
make the print-out hard to read.




"Richard" wrote in message
...
This may seem an unusual request! I have Word documents that need to be
viewable through our network but CANNOT be printed. Has anyone ever had
such
a need?