On Tue, Feb 15, 2000 at 01:34:29PM +0800, Bob Williams wrote:
> Since we've been on the topic of PDF's... I was looking for pdf2txt for
> the linux console - couldn't find one on my RedHat system.
>
The program may be called pdftotext.
Sidebar: If you can, pick up a program called whichman. In this package
is a fault-tolerant `which' (called ftwhich which I've aliased as which).
[Ugh, no puns intended] :-}
So when I did `which pdf2txt' I got back pdftotext as well as other programs
that sound similar. Whichman works the same for manpages. Must-have tool.
> But I did discover that ps2ascii (part of the ghostscript package I think)
> converts PDFs as well as standard postscript. I pipe it to less and can
> read the text at my leisure without creating a text file.
> ps2ascii file.pdf | less
>
While reading this I was downloading pdftohtml so I can use Lynx (my manpage
reader via hman/man2html) to view large pdf files.
I thought about recommending it but the test output so far doesn't look too
good. In one case, where the images in a pdf file are converted to jpg or png,
the image file was upside down(!?).
Output from fig2dev.pdf resulted in text with no spaces between words, too.
It's got a ways to go.
If you're interested in having a look the URL is
http://www.ra.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/~gosho/pdftohtml/
Anyway...
Using fig2dev.pdf file as an example I see that ps2ascii output isn't
formatted at all it seems (long unbroken lines) but turns out okay with
`less' since it wraps by default.
With pdftotext the output is much better with paragraphs, indenting and all
that. Looks good using `most' unwrapped but hard to deal with in `less'
(due to wrapping). Arrowing to the right causes it to unwrap-as-you-go
which doesn't help.
BTW, `Most' is sort of a colorful `less' - by the author of Jed and slrn.
Sadly, pdftotext doesn't support piping anyway.
So I guess if you want to quickly view PDFs then ps2ascii is the way to go.
If you have any plans to edit PDF output use pdftotext as it'll save a lot
of time in reformatting.
--
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