Linux.Desktop.Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 53. Display PDF Documents in a Terminal

You can view PDF documents in a terminal or
console; no graphical desktop is required.

This hack is similar to the
previous one, which converts Word
documents into HTML. But this hack shows you how to convert PDF
documents into HTML. Then you view the HTML version with a text-based
browser or pager called elinks. (The previous
hack used the w3m text browser, but
elinks works better than
w3m with this hack.) With a little scripting
magic and help from two programs, you can view the contents of a PDF
file in a text terminal or console.

This time you need to convert a PDF document to HTML before you run
it through the elinks pager.
There's a fine utility for doing just that, and
it's called (appropriately)
pdftohtml. You can find the home page for
pdftohtml at http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/. If
pdftohtml isn't already
installed in your distribution of Linux, or isn't on
your CD set, it's commonly available for Debian and
RPM-based distributions, such as Fedora, SUSE, and more. The
elinks program is also easily available if it
isn't automatically installed in your distribution.
For example, you can install pdftohtml and
elinks in Debian Linux with this command:

# apt-get install pdftohtml elinks

Users of the yum package can get the RPM version
with this command:

# yum install pdftohtml

Now you can view a PDF document with the following command. This
particular command has one drawback. The output will not include
frames (PDF files generally have a frame on the left that lets you
jump to different pages).

$ pdftohtml -q -noframes -stdout  document .pdf | elinks

If you want the left frame of page numbers, you can always use the
following command instead:

$ pdftohtml -q  document .pdf ; elinks  document l

You can write a script to save you all this typing each time you view
a document. Use sudo or log in as root to create
the /usr/local/bin/viewpdf script and enter the
following code:

#!/bin/bash
pdftohtml -q $1 ~/templ
elinks ~/templ

This code assumes it's OK to store the temporary
HTML file in your home directory. You can use another location if you
prefer.

Now save your work and make the file executable:

$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/viewpdf

Figure 7-4 shows an example of what a PDF document
will look like when you use viewpdf.

Figure 7-4. A PDF file shown in elinks