can i split a pdf file?

[Gary Kline]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 09:16:23AM +0100, Polytropon wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:06:18 -0800, Gary Kline <kline at thought.org> wrote:
> > 	Thanks, Gents,
> > 
> > 	But according to one smallish pdf file that I send to a web based
> > 	tool, it was not a real pdf.  Or, more accurately, it (the pdf to 
> > 	speech program) couldn't decode it.
> 
> This is a typical problem with "poorly engineered" PDFs where the
> author puts in the text as images (you'll see this stupidity across
> the Web, too).


	So what kind of moron is going to photograph pages --or maybe just
	get-screenshot-of-this-page" and upload it?   Or a Real question:
	I read an online pdf of "The Art of War" from the 1880's [?], and
	it was in an old-English or olden-Deutsch type font.  In PDF.  i
	have other p.d. texts in pdf and am wondering in there is some
	sort of scanner than can take a book-length script and create a
	pdf file.  Anybody know?  


> 
> A good tool to check if the PDF file can be (audibly) read is the
> use of the tool pdftotext from the port xpdf.
> 
> 	% pdftotext bla.pdf && less bla.txt
> 
> Then, even the FF speech plugin should work correctly - as long as
> the PDF file contains decodable text. If it's just a bunch of images,
> well, what are we expecting, hm? FF-speech: "You see a pretty image of
> some text..." :-)
> 

	Yeah, that's about right!  I got a bunch of ^L bytes and nothing
	else.  Now I'm looking at the file with od -c and, yup, it's and
	image. The parts inbetween pages are in ASCII.  Do you know what
	"MediaBox" is?

	At least the web article was not an image!  Google had it both in
	PDF and HTML.

	gary

> 
> 
> -- 
> Polytropon
> From Magdeburg, Germany
> Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
> Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...

-- 
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