On Tue, 2025-10-28 at 13:13 -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 12:45:34 -0400, [email protected] wrote: > > On Tuesday, October 28, 2025 09:34:02 AM Bigsy Bohr wrote: > > > On 2025-10-28, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > I'm looking for a utility or such to change the number of > > > > characters in > > > > lines of a .pdf file. > > > > > > With what are you reading the PDF, because that's the > > > straightforward > > > approach to your predicament? > > > > I'm reading with Okular. If I enlarge the font (to be readable) > > the number of > > characters per line remains the same but the line gets longer, > > leading to the > > need to scroll horizontally (in the window or with my head / eyes) > > to read the > > entire line. > > PDF was meant to be a "finished document", ready to be printed onto > paper. It was not meant to be scaled for accessibility, reformatted > for > varying output devices, and so on. What you saw was what you got. > > It was also never meant to be edited. It's a read-only output > product. > If you want to change a PDF, you get the original source material, in > whatever format it's written, make your edits there, and then > regenerate > the PDF.
IIRC, if you use a tool to create a Kindle or B&N reader file, such as Mobi, it can re-wrap lines. I haven't found one that runs in Linux, but I have run one in Windoze in a virtual machine in a window on Debian Trizie. > Reading the wikipedia page, there's a section called "Logical > structure > and accessibility", which says: > > A tagged PDF (see clause 14.8 in ISO 32000) includes document > structure and semantics information to enable reliable text > extraction > and accessibility.[33] Technically speaking, tagged PDF is a > stylized > use of the format that builds on the logical structure framework > introduced in PDF 1.3. Tagged PDF defines a set of standard > structure > types and attributes that allow page content (text, graphics, and > images) to be extracted and reused for other purposes.[34] > > Tagged PDF is not required in situations where a PDF file is > intended > only for print. Since the feature is optional, and since the > rules > for tagged PDF were relatively vague in ISO 32000-1, support for > tagged PDF among consuming devices, including assistive > technology > (AT), is uneven as of 2021.[35] >
