converting pdfs with xpdf

[Garrett Cooper]

Dave wrote:
> Hi,
>    Thanks. That gives me a starting place. I'll probably do it with 
> sed, i'm more familiar with that. Have you converted pdfs with 
> ghostscript? I'm looking for the commands i would have to issue. The 
> pdfs i want to convert to ps and to regular text files.
> Thanks.
> Dave.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Garrett Cooper" 
> <youshi10 at u.washington.edu>
> To: "FreeBSD Questions" <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 12:51 PM
> Subject: Re: converting pdfs with xpdf
>
>
>> On Jan 31, 2006, at 8:27 AM, Dave wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>    I'm running freebsd6 and xpdf 3.01_2. I've got pdfs that i want  
>>> to convert to ps and text documents in four different areas in my  
>>> home directory. I could convert them such as:
>>> pdfto format file1.pdf file2.ps etc.
>>> but i was wondering if there was a faster way? My second issue is  
>>> some of these files are pdf 1.6 and as i've already tried xpdf  
>>> won't convert these docs, does anyone have xpdf working with pdf  
>>> 1.6 files?
>>>    Second, after i convert all these docs there are three patterns  
>>> i'd like to remove from them, all having spaces and & signs in  
>>> them. Again, i could do this manually, but i was wondering one if  
>>> there was a faster way and two if i could do this on the tail end  
>>> of the conversion process so i would only have to issue one command  
>>> and come back probably a while later, these files are big, and it's  
>>> all done?
>>> Thanks.
>>> Dave.
>>
>> Ghostscript works wonders with PDFs and PSs, but then again I don't  
>> know how well the [linux-]acroread port works and that may be worth 
>> a  shot as well.
>> As for the removing of characters, if you have a text file you can  
>> always process it with sed or [g]awk.
>> -Garrett
    Take a gander at this: 
http://www.bsdforums.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-3899.html. Basically 
all you need is pdf2ps, which is available with the port 
<print/gnu-ghostscript>.
-Garrett