Re: strategy for viewing pdf files in lynx

Re: strategy for viewing pdf files in lynx

[Martin McCormick]

	I did not know one could read pdf documents from the
command line in Linux.  How is this done?

	There are a lot of pdf viewers out there but I thought
they all used X Windows.

	I would certainly rather have a converter that I am in
control of on the local system.

	I looked for pdf to text in various spellings, but I may
have just not been as imaginative as I should be.

Re: strategy for viewing pdf files in lynx

[Willem van der Walt<vdwaltw@health.gov.za>]

Hi,
If you hav'nt found it by now, it is pdftotext
that you are looking for. It uses ghostscript.
I had it working as a viewer in pine and lynx
before my last upgrade.
It works mostly.
regards, Willem

On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, Martin McCormick wrote:

> 	I did not know one could read pdf documents from the
> command line in Linux.  How is this done?
> 
> 	There are a lot of pdf viewers out there but I thought
> they all used X Windows.
> 
> 	I would certainly rather have a converter that I am in
> control of on the local system.
> 
> 	I looked for pdf to text in various spellings, but I may
> have just not been as imaginative as I should be.
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-list@redhat.com
> https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
> 

-- 
Willem van der Walt
Information Services Directorate
Department of Health
South Africa
tel: 27 12 3120700

Re: strategy for viewing pdf files in lynx

[Monty Lilburn]

Sorry, that url should have had a letter "l" at the end of the address.
It should be:

http://www.csd.uch.gr/~nikop/thesis.html

Monty


>Nicolas, I found a site on Google which hosts the code for a postscript to
>html convertor.  I haven't had a look yet but the url is:
>
>http://www.csd.uch.gr/~nikop/thesis.htm

Re: strategy for viewing pdf files in lynx

[Monty Lilburn]

Thanks Janina for your suggestions.  I already have ghostscript installed
and working with samba printing so that should help in getting the pdf
documents converted to postscript.  When I just tried to install the
slackware GV package it appeared to need some X libraries etc.  I'm not
sure if it would actually run from the console.

Nicolas, I found a site on Google which hosts the code for a postscript to
html convertor.  I haven't had a look yet but the url is:

http://www.csd.uch.gr/~nikop/thesis.htm

Maybe it will help?

Monty




On Thu, 8 Aug 2002, Nicolas Pitre wrote:

>On Thu, 8 Aug 2002, Janina Sajka wrote:
>
>> I don't think there's any reason, really, to send a PDF off to Adobe for
>> translation to text, since gv, or pdftotext can do it just as well.
>
>However, doing so you lose all hyperlinks inside the document, like table of
>content indexing, that the PDF to HTML tool from Adobe provides you.
>
>Anyone knows about a pdftohtml command line tool?
>
>
>Nicolas
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Blinux-list mailing list
>Blinux-list@redhat.com
>https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>

-- 

  --------------------------------------------------------------

                         SUBMERGED IN THE 6o4 AREA CODE

A proud user of the LINUX Operating System!
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: strategy for viewing pdf files in lynx

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Thu, 8 Aug 2002, Janina Sajka wrote:

> I don't think there's any reason, really, to send a PDF off to Adobe for 
> translation to text, since gv, or pdftotext can do it just as well.

However, doing so you lose all hyperlinks inside the document, like table of 
content indexing, that the PDF to HTML tool from Adobe provides you.

Anyone knows about a pdftohtml command line tool?


Nicolas

Re: strategy for viewing pdf files in lynx

[Janina Sajka]

Hi, Monty:

I think you're overcomplicating this just a tad, but I suspect the 
simplification I'm going to suggest won't fully fix the problem. However, 
I haven't thought it through entirely.

I don't think there's any reason, really, to send a PDF off to Adobe for 
translation to text, since gv, or pdftotext can do it just as well. In 
fact, our Linux tools can do it better because they can be tweaked to 
ignore the "don't translate this file to text" flag, unlike Adobe, which 
will honor it and tell you "sorry, pal."

So, I suggest getting PDF to text translation working at the command line, 
then adding the syntax to mailcap to handle it in your mailer.

 On Thu, 8 Aug 2002, Monty Lilburn 
wrote:

> Hi list,
> 
> I am hoping someone can either point me in the right direction, or tell me
> if I am over-complicating things!
> 
> I am  wanting to be able to read a ".pdf" document in lynx without having
> to save the pdf file or parse it through an external convertor.
> 
> http://access.adobe.com has a perl/cgi script which you can pass a url to
> and it will convert the pdf document to html on the fly.  For those
> interested, the url is:
> 
> http://access.adobe.com/perl/convertPDF.pl?url=subdomain.domain/file.pdf
> 
> My idea was to set up an entry in my .mailcap file which could process
> the "application/pdf" mime-type and load the url via a another lynx
> command like:
> 
> application/pdf; lynx http://access.adobe.com/perl/convertPDF.pl?url=%s
> 
> Of course the above entry is broken because the "%s" mailcap variable
> translates to a local temperary file created by lynx and not the
> remote url/FileName.
> 
> 
> Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get this to work, possible
> alternatives, or maybe a way to do this within the lynx.cfg file?
> 
> thanks
>   Monty
> 
> 

-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina@afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

Chair, Accessibility SIG
Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF)
http://www.openebook.org

strategy for viewing pdf files in lynx

[Monty Lilburn]

Hi list,

I am hoping someone can either point me in the right direction, or tell me
if I am over-complicating things!

I am  wanting to be able to read a ".pdf" document in lynx without having
to save the pdf file or parse it through an external convertor.

http://access.adobe.com has a perl/cgi script which you can pass a url to
and it will convert the pdf document to html on the fly.  For those
interested, the url is:

http://access.adobe.com/perl/convertPDF.pl?url=subdomain.domain/file.pdf

My idea was to set up an entry in my .mailcap file which could process
the "application/pdf" mime-type and load the url via a another lynx
command like:

application/pdf; lynx http://access.adobe.com/perl/convertPDF.pl?url=%s

Of course the above entry is broken because the "%s" mailcap variable
translates to a local temperary file created by lynx and not the
remote url/FileName.


Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get this to work, possible
alternatives, or maybe a way to do this within the lynx.cfg file?

thanks
  Monty

-- 

  --------------------------------------------------------------

                         SUBMERGED IN THE 6o4 AREA CODE

A proud user of the LINUX Operating System!
----------------------------------------------------------------------