Baslinux mailing list

[baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org]

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.