6 Jun
2005
6 Jun
'05
4:48 a.m.
On Sun, 2005-06-05 at 19:44 -0500, Scott Stevens wrote:
With the xpdf program, which runs under X, and which
IS open-source
(I've certainly never run a binary of it that I didn't compile locally
from source) you can use 'print to file' to convert a PDF, or selected
pages from a PDF, to a postscript file.
xpdf performance is horrible, though. Unless they've dramatically
improved it in the last couple of months, it really barfs on PDF files
containing large image scans - load time is significant and performance
as perceived by the user is slow (e.g. scrolling images).
kpdf had the same sort of limitations.
Ghostscript fell down on render quality (although to be fair I never did
look to see if there was a "render things properly" switch :)
Acrobat is bloated as all hell, but is at least OK on performance. Of
course it's not an open solution, which may well bug some people
(personally I don't mind closed apps, providing they're very
configurable, not bloated, and not prone to feature-creep)
I'm not sure what other PDF viewers there are for Linux or the BSD
variants (or commercial Unix platforms for that matter). Hence the
reason I always end up 'unpacking' PDF files (at least onces containing
scans), as there are millions of free image viewers out there that can
handle TIFF files and provide a UI giving thumbnail overviews - plus I
can easily manipulate from the command-line, print etc. and do all the
stuff that a PDF viewer would do (in the context of scanned images of
course)
cheers
Jules