Re: strategy for viewing pdf files in lynx

[Janina Sajka <janina afb net>]

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