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Comment by DrAwdeOccarim | Hacker News Reader

That's why I use it at work. If I don't pay for my employees to get Acrobat Pro, or allow them to install software outside of a helpdesk tickets, then I know a PDF they generate using our lab management software is unadulterated. It's part of our data verification policy. It's not that I think my employees with change data nefariously, it's that they may want to edit the layout and accidentally change a numerical value.

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Don't these users have a recent version of MS Word?

LibreOffice Draw is pretty good for editing PDFs - if you have all the matching fonts. So I wouldn't go assuming people can't edit PDFs.

The document can be tampersealed to help prevent or at least notify of that.

In a way a locked tampersealed document is a pretty decent template for parsing data as well. It is messy as PDFs always are but a decent lib and a consistent source with sealed docs can be used for decently verifiable scraping.

For instance some sort of license, certification or official document like tax forms, it can be generated with a common output, tampersealed and then reliably parsed after verification.

They'd need to put in a ticket to get it installed, which I would need to approve. But also, this isn't to stop malice it's to stop accidental edits. I can't stop my employees from messing with things if they want to. That's where the trust part and common goals come into play.

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