Sometimes, companies come up with the most stupid restrictions. And unfortunately, other companies enable them to do that.

In this particular case, the DHL parcel service and Acrobat teamed up: You can buy and print shipping labels online with DHL. I thought I'd give that a try, especially since there is a 24h dropbox nearby.

The label can be printed either using a Java applet or a PDF file. It thought PDF - sounds great. But it isn't. It's a very special PDF file. It has a scriped printing button that will print with the default settings (so it comes out at a completely different printer that I would have wanted to print it). In fact I would have expected the printing dialog to come up, and thought the button had not functioned at all. Also I could probably not have used it if I had opened the PDF file in a different PDF viewer. At my own laptop I might not even have Adobe Reader anymore - I use Evince. It's faster and has a much better UI. But I don't have a printer, so I used a computer at the university which used Acrobat by default, fortunately.

And: you may only print the real shipping label once. Only 'sample' labels can be printed arbitrarily often. This is counted on the server side, btw., and also applies to the Java applet.

Apparently you also must not rename the PDF file (WTF?) and you need to be online to print the file. So you can't save the PDF file and take it to an offline computer that does have a printer...

Dear DHL: have you heard of that ancient technology called 'Photocopiers', sometimes also dubbed 'Xerox'? You know... lots of people still have these. Heck, I figure I could even use Adobe Reader to print the label into another PDF file with the print restrictions removed...

So you gain nothing by preventing multiple printouts, but you can seriously annoy users (e.g. when their printer malfunctions)

Please stop imposing such stupid restrictions on users.