Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

baslinux - Re: [BL] status of pdf under BL3; a current summary

baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Baslinux mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] status of pdf under BL3; a current summary
  • Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:17:25 -0500 (CDT)

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, I wrote:

In connection with the laptop I'm planning to set up soon I've looked further into pdf-viewing issues under BL3. I do need to have pdf viewing capability on the laptop, so I want to be aware in advance of any problems I might encounter on that front. My concerns are mainly with viewing--as opposed to printing--pdf's since I seem to be able to print them just fine using Sindi's gs package.

I tried my hand at compiling the latest xpdf in order to get a more up-to-date pdf viewer than the one recommended for BL 3.5 (the one from Slack4, which is version 0.7a) but it was getting a bit too involved. I also tried out Sindi's convert-to-ppm method, but without much success: it inflates the size of the pdf's tremendously (as she warned) and BL3's built-in graphics viewer apparently does not handle ppm anyway. At least it wouldn't view the ppm's I created. So I decided to just do some testing with the xpdf viewer recommended for BL 3.5 to see just what it would be capable of.

It turns out that viewer, i.e., xpdf version 0.7a, officially supports only up to version 1.2 of the pdf spec. I decided to throw some pdf's created according to later pdf specs (1.3 and >) at it to see just what would happen. Following are the results.

xpdf v. 0.7a seemed to render just fine all the 1.3 and 1.4 pdf's I tried it with. I was more interested to see how it would handle yet later pdf versions--documents created according to the 1.5 and 1.6 pdf spec (the latest version of the spec according to Wikipedia is 1.7, btw). Well, first of all, it was hard to find such documents: most of the pdf's I ran across in my searches were version 1.3 or 1.4. But I did manage to finally find some version 1.5 and 1.6 pdf's. Here's the report on attempting to view those with xpdf v. 0.7a.

When I tried to open 1.5 and > pdf files xpdf complained that they were later versions than it was designed to handle, but the program proceeded anyway. xpdf v. 0.7a was able to render all documents I tried it on (4 - 8 documents found in web searches). There were some minor display issues that seemed limited to graphics (a graphic missing or skewed colors in a graphic), but the text portions of those documents seemed to render just fine.

The only trouble xpdf v. 0.7a seemed to have with any pdf document I looked at was in the case of encrypted pdf documents. In cases where I tried to open an encrypted pdf, xpdf v 0.7a would simply abort. The terminal output afterward indicated that this was because the document was encrypted. The inability of xpdf v. 0.7a to display encrypted pdf's seemed unaffected by the pdf spec according to which the document was created: perhaps it simply can't handle encrypted pdf's of any spec.

The final verdict? xpdf v 0.7a will work fine for my purposes. It will attempt to render post-pdf-1.2 documents and appears to do pretty well with rendering them, all the way up to version 1.6. Perhaps seems that the later pdf specs address mainly document characteristics other than simple text rendering: those characteristics are generally ones I am least interested in seeing anyway. I'm going to stick with xpdf v. 0.7a from Slack4 on my laptop (along with its elflibs dependency).

Case closed.

James

PS Viewing encrypted pdf's is a separate problem from viewing unencrypted pdf's. There exist methods for "cracking" such pdf's and, if need arises for reading such files under BL3, such methods may be adapted for at some point in the future.




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page