handling pdfs?

[Chuck Robey]

Gary Jennejohn wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:05:18 -0500
> Bill Moran <wmoran at collaborativefusion.com> wrote:
> 
>> In response to Giorgos Keramidas <keramida at ceid.upatras.gr>:
>>
>>> On 2007-11-27 21:27, Chuck Robey <chuckr at chuckr.org> wrote:
>>>> I need to read about 4 tons of some really sparse pdf specs.  I also
>>>> have a rather inconvenient throwback: I feel hugely more at
>>>> home-reading  documents in paper.  What I'd kind of like to do would
>>>> be able to perform cut'n'paste among different pdfs, 5 pages here, 10
>>>> pages there, until I put together maybe 100-200 pages, and sit back
>>>> and read it. What I can't do is print just a few pages out of several
>>>> 800-plus page specs, and perform paper cut'n'pasting.
>>> If you find a way to 'save' only parts of a PDF document, i.e. pages
>>> 5-10, 17 and 25 in a separate file, then the ``pdfjam'' port includes
>>> a utility called ``pdfjoin'' :)
>> You could print the desired pages to .ps files, use ps2pdf to convert
>> them and then pdfjam to combine them.
>>
>> It's enough of a roundabout that I don't know if it's worth it or not.
>>
> 
> xpdf allows printing of page ranges. I use it all the time.
> 

I'm not sure why, maybe I have too poor a font selection here, but the 
fonts, I mean, the onscreen fonts that xpdf seems to choose, always 
seems to run characters together, so it gets hard to read them.  So, 
xpdf wouldn't be my first choice.  I use kpdf to view pdfs for that 
particular reason, and onthe same document, kpdf does a distinctly 
better job,  If kpdf uses xpdf's engine, then it must find some way to 
pick better fonts for itself, it actually does look better.