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> BTW, it is possible to configure the links browser
> to run xpdf automatically for pdf files.

Or to use pdftotext to extract the text and display it.
pdfimages will extract the images.
They are included in the xpdf package.

> > Just curious though, Which type of up-to-date PDF files
> > might cause problems w/ the Slackware 4.0 xpdf ??
>
> Sindi, I believe, had some pdfs which the old xpdf
> couldn't handle.

The Slackware 7.1 xpdf could not handle pdf 1.5, and there is now a pdf 
1.6.  I probably got some error message when I tried to view 1.5.
People send me a lot of scanned pages wrapped in pdf.

It is not difficult to add to BL3.5 the glibc from Slackware 8.1 or 9.0
You don't need the whole package.  If you copy over just a few files, run 
ldconfig afterwards.  ldd 'executable-name' will list what libraries you 
need for a particular executable.

xpdf 3.02 (latest? precompiled) comes with three command-line 
non-X programs which require glibc:  pdfimages, pdftotext, pdftoppm.

The actual xpdf I think requires a glibc X, and it is not simple to 
upgrade BL3.50 to that.  The latest gs and svgalib compiled without X 
support are at my site but require glibc 2.2.5 or later.

pdfimages works on a pdf 1.5 file (scanned images, this may be some new 
form of compression).  pdfimages is fine for scanned documents but omits 
text in anything else.  pdftotext omits images.

pdftoppm converts both text and image to a set of images. Add the X fonts 
from Abiword or it will not work on some files (where the font is 
specified).  The Abiword fonts are sufficient for running ghostscript so 
you don't need the large fonts package for ghostscript.

xpdf is a particularly slow program, especially with low memory, but 
displays better quality than gs alone does in X.  It may be faster to 
convert with pdftoppm then view with xli.

Sindi



> Cheers,
> Steven

Sindi