Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Sat, 6 Jan 2007, Lee Forrest wrote:

> > pdftopbm is much smaller than gs or xpdf. gs is gigantic.
>
> I don't know pdftopbm.

Download my 381K package and try it in BL3.

> > > How much hdd space do you use?

> A thousand megabytes is not tiny.

It is 1.2GB with a LOT of photos, which take up the same space no matter 
what linux you put them into, and sheet music pdfs, and midi files.  My 
BL3 is 110MB with lots of things I don't really need but no compiler.

Ubuntu insists on 2GB to install, without adding programs or personal 
files.

We have three 20GB hard drives now, and a 12, and a 10, and a 9, and an 
8MB scsi drive, and some 6s and 5s and 4s...

The laptop drives are 1-2GB on the pentiums (we upgraded).
I do not compile or store photos on them, or do music.

> 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.

With the i810 chip?  If so, it works better than an older X.

> > > > 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.

It does NOT NOT NOT need gs.  It needs a set of fonts, and gs is one 
possible place to get them from and was the default for the config file.
Download my package and install into BL3 and you can view pdf 1.5 by 
converting to a pbm file and viewing with xli.

The fonts are not needed for viewing image-only pdfs produced by a 
scanner, just pdfimages file.pdf.  The fonts are needed to display text.

> > 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.

> > xpdf3 is much larger than my package.

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

Yes it is.  No you don't.


> > 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.

I did not say that, I said you need a small set of fonts from gs.

> > The SW4.0 GS is ten times as big as what I put together,
>
> Not if it needs gs to work.

It does not.

> > 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.

So use pdftopbm to view the formatting, instead of pdftotext to view just 
the text or pdfimages to extract the images only.

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

Not in BL3 with xpdf 3 because it does not work with BL3's older libX11, 
which I am hoping you will compile a replacement for based on libc5 or 
uclibc (static or dynamic).  The conversion programs do not use X and 
therefore they do work in BL3.

> Lee

Sindi