Confidential Document Print Suppression in Curl applets

Over at developers.curl.com I have added a blog post on preventing the printing of material presented in a Curl applet.

One simple technique given in that example is to exploit the media attribute of the CSS style element.

I have a more elaborate working example of suppressing screen capture at LogiqueWerks.com where the user is mouse-and-keyboard constrained.

Dealing with actual camera capture of text material is another matter, but if the user hopes for quick transfer of a snapshot to PDF and then extraction with OCR, you can impede that by an overlay or a background.  In the case of Adobe, including marginal text in tiny font wrecks havoc with its text generation as does a zero margin with a visible border in a thickness near that of the letter "I" or "l".  An overlay with graphical lines is also somewhat effective in defeating OCR.

After that, anything eye-only is only as secure as the person viewing the material - in the presence of your lawyers and without cellphones, computing tablets and Q.