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

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  • 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 18:26:32 +0000 (UTC)

On Thu, 20 Mar 2008, baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

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.

zgv works. xv. So does a viewer included with netpbm (which David Moberg compiled for BL3 or maybe it was uclibc). But they are BIG files.

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.

Most of what people send me is a pdf version of a bunch of scanned pages, so they are ALL graphics and I needed something newer.


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.

Try pdftops. ps is not encrypted. Also fixes problems with IRS files.

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).

If you only need to read text, use pdftotext. You lose the formatting but it makes much smaller files. I set up links with pdftotext as a downloader in lynx.cfg to view the text with less or pico (pico lets me save it under another name).

DOWNLOADER:View pdf as text (pdftotext,less):pdftotext %2
[line continues] /tmp/pdf.txt;less /tmp/pdf.txt:TRUE

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.

gs 8.54 deals with encrypted pdf. pdftops.




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