CLI pdf viewer for linux [closed]
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01-10-2019 - |
문제
Hey, for quite a while now, I am looking for a pdf viewer for the command line.
As I like to work without X on Linux, and often work on a remote machine, I would like to have a tool to read pdfs. There are quite a lot of really good graphical programs (evince, okular, acroread, ...) to do the job, so I figured there should be at least one decent text-mode tool. But I don't even know of a crappy one!
Currently, I either start X only to read pdfs, or use pdftohtml+lynx. However, the latter does not produce a very good output, and most documents are just unreadable, especially if they contain mathematical formula.
Google is full of people saying either it's not possible or suggesting the pdftohtml version.
I realise, this is not exactly a programming question, but I am currently considering starting a project to implement such a program, unless there already is a good one out there.
Thanks for any suggestions.
해결책
Hi I think that you don't need to write a program for your purpose I mean reading pdf file in console mode because "less" command already do it for you. So use it and just enjoy it.
less "the name of pdf file"
다른 팁
Ok, you asked to know even "crappy" ones. Here are two (decide yourself about their respective crappiness):
First: Ghostscript's txtwrite
output device
gs \
-dBATCH \
-dNOPAUSE \
-sDEVICE=txtwrite \
-sOutputFile=- \
/path/to/your/pdf
Second: XPDF's pdftotext
CLI utility (better than Ghostscript):
pdftotext \
-f 13 \
-l 17 \
-layout \
-opw supersecret \
-upw secret \
-eol unix \
-nopgbrk \
/path/to/your/pdf
- |less
This will display the page range 13 (first page) to 17 (last page), preserve the layout of a double-password protected named PDF file (using user and owner passwords secret and supersecret), with Unix EOL convention, but without inserting pagebreaks between PDF pages, piped through less...
pdftotext -h
displays all available commandline options.
Of course, both tools only work for the text parts of PDFs (if they have any). Oh, and mathematical formula also won't work too well... ;-)
Edit: I had mis-typed the command above (originally using pdftops
instead of pdftotext
).
By the way, i m always in the same situation, and I use mc (midnight commander) which handles text pdf's very well... Just view the file (F3) in mc
This would only work if your PDF document is structured, i.e. it is a tagged PDF document.
This is required to get the correct reading-order of the text objects in the document.
Tagged PDF documents also allow your to re-flow the document though I am not aware of any tool doing that with command line output.