[Development] Nokia/Digia copyright in PDF produced by QPrinter

[David Boddie]

On Sun Oct 6 20:51:40 CEST 2013, Lars Knoll wrote:

> The producer field in PDF is generally used for marking what has been used
> to produce the PDF. In Qt 5 this reads:
>
>    xprintf("\n/Producer ");
>    printString(QString::fromLatin1("Qt " QT_VERSION_STR " (C) 2012 Digia
> Plc and/or its subsidiary(-ies)"));
>
> which gives inside the PDF:
>
> /Producer (Qt 5.1.1 \(C\) 2012 Digia Plc and/or its subsidiary\(-ies\))
>
>
> I think this is fully correct, and doesn't assert any copyright over the
> generated PDF. It states that the PDF got produced by the PDF generator of
> Qt 5.1.1, which is (C) Digia.

While this interpretation may be valid, it is unusual to put the copyright of
the creation tool in the Producer string. I can find documents with the following
Producer strings on my disk:

(AFPL Ghostscript 8.54)
(Acrobat 5.0 Image Conversion Plug-in for Macintosh)
(Adobe PDF library 4.800)
(Aladdin Ghostscript 6.01)
(GNU Ghostscript 7.07)
(GPL Ghostscript 9.05)
(ImageMagick 6.3.8 01
(Inkscape inkscape 0.44.1)
(LaTeX with hyperref)
(Mac OS X 10.5.8 Quartz PDFContext)
(MiKTeX pdfTeX-1.40.9)
(Microsoft� Publisher 2010)
(cairo 1.9.5 (http:
(pdfTeX-2.00.0)
(pdfeTeX-1.403)
(xdvipdfmx \(0.7.5\))

The only two that I found that included a copyright symbol were Qt and Microsoft Word.
The above Microsoft Publisher string presumably includes a registered trademark symbol,
which is more common.

I suggest removing the Producer copyright string to avoid confusion since it is clear
that Digia doesn't seek to claim copyright on user-generated content. Along the same
lines, it might be useful to add a setProducer() function to QPrinter for applications
that create PDFs as a key part of their functionality.

David