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  • From: Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [BL] encrypted pdf file
  • Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2004 18:03:03 -0500 (EST)

A friend asked us to fix his mother's Epson printer. It would not
self-test using common combinations of buttons. There are three buttons -
red green and yellow, none labelled except with some cryptic symbols.

It is a Windows printer so we could not use print screen.

I found the 'basic' (smaller version) user manual at Epson and downloaded
it. 2.5M pdf file.

pdftotext said it could not handle it so I installed xpdf.
pdf2ps would not handle it - it is encrypted. Nor would xpdf.

I have had this problem before. DOS ghostscript won't do encrypted files
unless you download another piece somewhere, which I never did because
pdf2ps for DOS will convert it to ps and I can view ps with psview.

It is a 2.5M file and I did not feel like splitting it to 2 floppies so I
brought the DOS pdf2ps to this computer. It produced an 8M ps file from
the pdf file that I fetched to DOS with ltools (lcd /tmp, lread filename
filename - the second being the DOS file name and path). Converted and
got an 8M ps file.

Went into linux and since I have nothing to read ps files with, used
ps2pdf to convert it back. Got a readable pdf file which is 27M (!).
Looked at it briefly with xpdf and could only read the larger text. Tried
xsvga and xvesa. Pictures were there. Something about a movie.
And many lines of small grey dots which I surmise are small text.
I don't feel like printing out 64 pages of this junk to find instructions
on the self-test. I could split the file and take it to a DOS computer
with psview via floppy disk.

DOS gs/psview is so far much handier than linux gs/xpdf - faster and it
will display 256 colors if you have Trident or Tseng cards, and it can
decode encrypted files.


So I ran pdftotext on it and got an 8M txt file that is full of blank
pages and ^T ^F scattered around the screen.

How do linux users normally handle encrypted pdf files? Xpdf is
excruciatingly slow and there was no table of contents, just a bunch of
pictures of how to see the instructions as a movie in Windows.

Does Abiword read ps files faster than xpdf reads pdf files?

I have asked the friend to read through the pdf file and let us know how
to do a self-test. He thinks it is holding down one button while pushing
another one. We could try all six possible combinations, I suppose.
In the meantime we gave him a working HP 540. Epson C60 or S60?





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