PDF to Command line format

Tux-O-Matic · 10-03-2006, 04:32 PM

I'm looking for some sort of software to convert a pdf (or other file that's not formatted to the command line) into command-line format.

I mean for Linux...

michaelk · 10-03-2006, 04:57 PM

What do you mean by command line format? ASCII text?
Have you googled for pdf text converter?

Tux-O-Matic · 10-03-2006, 05:03 PM

I want to be able to view PDF's in a command line window without having to buy that expensive "PDF to Text (pdf2text) SDK-COM" converter.
And I would like it to be a bash command.

michaelk · 10-03-2006, 05:20 PM

AFAIK a PDF console viewer does not exist. However, xpdf contains console tools to convert a pdf file to html (pdftohtml) or text (pdftotext).

http://freshmeat.net/projects/xpdf/

Garda · 10-04-2006, 06:32 AM

i'm sure that there are many tools that let you convert pdf files into html files. There would probably also be some (probably fewer) tools to convert pdf to plain text.

you can view html files in the command line using lynx and text files can easily be read with a text editor or simply cat

try something like

Code:

cat textfile.txt | less

that should let you look at text files from the command line

hand of fate · 10-04-2006, 06:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Garda

Code:

cat textfile.txt | less

that should let you look at text files from the command line

I'm not tatally sure what the commands actually mean, but in my experience just

Code:

less textfile.txt

does exactly the same thing with less code.

pwc101 · 10-04-2006, 07:05 AM

try

Code:

pdf2ps some_file.pdf some_file.ps && ps2ascii some_file.ps | less

edit: it seems I also have a command pdftotext, which does the same as above, but without needing to output to a ps file.