Baslinux mailing list

[<keesan2 AT cyberspace.org>]

On Fri, 30 May 2003 jamtat AT mailsnare.net wrote:

> >
> > Have you had time to check out pdfimage or pdftops?
> >
> Check them out how?  pdftoimage, I would imagine, makes a scanned pdf
> image into a .gif or .jpeg or something.  Is that right? 


Most pdf files contain both text and images.  pdftotext extracts the text
part.  pdfimage extracts the images as a series of pbm or pnm (monochrome
or color) images with sequentially numbered file names.  You will need to
read the documentation for the correct command.  I have used only the DOS
version.

There is something out for Windows now called a 'pdf machine' which I
think means people scan pages and convert them to pdf instead of gif, in
which case a pdf file might consist of nothing but full-page images.  The
DOS pdfimage program had problems with this format sometimes.

Yes, you will need some image viewer that views pbm and pnm images.  I
don't have one installed, and I don't even have space left to install zgv
along with these three pdf convertors.  I need to put together another
computer.  Does zgv view these formats?


 Then I'd try to
> view it with zgv or something and see if it checks out?  I can sort of
> understand how I'd do something like this.  


As for pdftops, I'm at a loss.
> I don't have any printer, let alone a ps printer.  I do use a fake
> postscript printer under M$Win to print .doc files to .ps files so I can
> convert them to .pdf using ps2pdf.  But I don't see how that would allow
> me to check how your friend's pdftops converter is working.  How does one
> go about checking the integrity of a .ps file anyway?  What do I look for?
> Is it enough to just run the program on a file without it returning error
> messages to confirm that it's ok?  I need more instructions.

I had not thought about this.  I have ghostscript for both DOS and Linux
and could convert pdf to ps and then view/print the ps with ghostscript.
I also have psview for DOS, which lets you enlarge output on the screen.
I have not used a printer with Linux yet, so maybe I will check out
the output ps file in DOS to make life simpler.   I can view both the pdf
and the ps forms of the same file, and also compare the output of the DOS
and Linux pdftops programs.

If I check out pdftops can you handle pdfimages?

> James
> _______________________________________________

Sindi Keesan