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Further research on this issue has turned up some information that may 
indicate why I am having trouble displaying the text of pdf's on my BL 3.5 
system (using xpdf 0.7a from Slack4). First, the README that comes with 
this version of xpdf states:

---------------------------------------------
Fonts
-----

Xpdf uses X server fonts.  It requires the following fonts:

* Courier: medium-r, bold-r, medium-o, and bold-o
* Helvetica: medium-r, bold-r, medium-o, and bold-o
* Times: medium-r, bold-r, medium-i, and bold-i
* Symbol: medium-r
* Zapf Dingbats: medium-r

Most X installations should already have all of these fonts, except
Zapf Dingbats.  You can install a Type 1 Zapf Dingbats font -- see the
mkfontdir(1) man page for details.  Use this font descriptor in your
fonts.scale file:

    -itc-zapfdingbats-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-adobe-fontspecific

You can get a Type 1 font file from the ghostscript 4.x distribution
(look for d050000l.pfb).

X servers, starting at R5, support font scaling.  Xpdf will
automatically take advantage of this.  There are two types of scaling.
The first type uses standard bitmap fonts: if a font doesn't exist in
the requested size, the server will scale the bitmapped characters.
This is reasonably fast, and the results are readable but not very
pretty.  X servers can also handle true scalable, e.g., Type 1, fonts.
(See the mkfontdir(1) man page for details on setting these up.)
Scalable fonts are slower, especially since PDF documents tend to use
lots of fonts, but they look much nicer.
------------------------------------------------

> From this, I gather that I am seeing no text in the pdf files I open, and 
I get the error messages in the console I've listed, because I do not have 
those fonts installed. Sound reasonable?

I wanted to see if I might circumvent this issue by perhaps provide a 
command-line option, so I tried to consult the manpage to see what 
command-line options xpdf takes. I managed to find a manpage for version 
0.7a (I think it's important that the manpage be for the version I have 
installed) at 
http://www.filewatcher.com/p/xpdf-i_0.7a-2.deb.337584/usr/X11R6/man/man1.htm 
. I don't quite understand the formatting of that document and how to make 
it display like a normal manpage, but I was able to glean some relevant 
information from it anyway.

It seems this task will require a fair amount more puzzling and/or 
experimentation if I am to get away without installing the fuller X font 
packages from Slack4. Further input will be appreciated.

Thanks,
James