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  • From: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] Preferred PDF Viewer?
  • Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:48:31 +0000 (UTC)

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




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