Baslinux mailing list

[Lee Forrest <lforrestster AT gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jan 06, 2007 at 05:15:27PM +0000, sindi keesan wrote:

> On Fri, 5 Jan 2007, Lee Forrest wrote:
>
> >> You can convert pdf files to text and/or images with       ,
> >> pdfimages pdftotext                                        ,
> >
> > Needs gs. No way.
> >
> > I thought you were into tiny linux, but you seem to run every
> > gigantic program I've ever heard of.
>
> pdftopbm is much smaller than gs or xpdf. gs is gigantic.

I don't know pdftopbm. 

> > How much hdd space do you use?
> >
> > You never post that.
>
> Different on each computer. We were setting up friends with
> 30MB BL3 and kermit, links, links2, lynx, and Opera, but
> someone wanted Abiword and then I added netpbm.
>
> On my fastest computer I have source code for two kernels,
> uclibc, busybox source code, and some collections of music
> (midi files, sheet music) and lots of photos. So about 1GB or
> even more.

A thousand megabytes is not tiny.

> >> and pdftopbm (part of netpbm). Then view with zgv or links2
> >> (svga-based) without X.
> >
> > How many times do I have to tell you that I'm not installing
> > svgalib or zgv?
>
> It appears that your video chip is not supported by svgalib (or
> by BL3 X, most likely).
>
> You told me it was not possible to view images without X.

No I didn't.

> I was refuting that statement, since though it may be true for
> your hardware it is not for any of mine. I replaced i810 video
> with real video cards.

I told you that I ran zgv at one point. It worked. As well as that
buggy svgalib works, that is.

I've viewed thousands of images with it.

> >> For BL3 I added a very minimal set of gs fonts
> >
> > Yeh. Funny. A limited set of fonts for a gigantic
> > application.
>
> I did NOT add gs, just a set of 12 basic fonts from gs (I
> could possibly have gotten them from some place else instead
> but I had gs) which is needed by the pdftopbm convertor

So pdftopbm needs gs. That's not tiny.

> to product a plain pbm image file that you can then view with
> a viewer, probably even XLI, since it is monochrome. 381K .tgz
> package (probably at my site, pdf-noX-fonts.tgz) includes all
> three convertors, a minimal set of fonts (plain, italic, bold,
> italic/bold- I included three sets tho one would probably do
> it), the xpdfrc file you need to use the convertors without the
> enormous full gs font set, and a few doc/man files. It would be
> smaller without CHANGES but that looked interesting.
>
> This package works in BL3 to read the newer pdf 1.5. The SW8.1
> gs does not even read it (or work in BL3, wrong libX11).
> xpdf3.0 does not work with BL3 X, 

> but you may need to upgrade your X anyway to work with your
> video chip.

Looking that way.

> xpdf3 is much larger than my package.

No it isn't. You need gs to make it work.

> I got the convertors out of the xpdf big package at their site
> (they come with xpdf itself but can be used without X).
>
> > 3.5M for just the basic package on SW4.0
>
> You are referring to gs itself, not pdftopbm with a few fonts.

You said above that you needed gs to make pdftopbm do a common
conversion job.

> The SW4.0 GS is ten times as big as what I put together,

Not if it needs gs to work.

> and my package includes the convertors for making pdf files
> into images and/or text.

I like the idea of turning PDF into HTML, but don't see point
of just plain text. The formatting is important.

If you just want to pull one or two images and some blocks
of text, then you can easily do that with xpdf. 

[delete]

Lee

-- 
BasicLinux: Small is Beautiful
http://www.basiclinux.com.ru