Reading PDFs on the command line (with misc/lesspipe)

[Bertram Scharpf]

On Wednesday, 29. Jun 2016, 13:26:33 +0200, Ralf Mardorf via freebsd-questions wrote:
> > Since I use mutt to read emails on my server, I would like to
> > read PDFs on the command line. How can I do that?

> On Wed, 29 Jun 2016 12:29:45 +0200, Niklaas Baudet von Gersdorff wrote:
> >  $ less some.pdf
>
> I wonder how it is handled assumed "some.pdf" is just a scanned picture
> of text converted to pdf ;).

I do the following (from the shell, not yet from mutt):

  - Forward X to the desktop machine:

    xto() {
      local h l d
      h=${1:-desktop}
      l=`hostname -f`
      d=":0"
      ssh $h "
        export DISPLAY=$d
        xhost $l 1>&2
        xauth extract - $d
      " | xauth -f ~/.Xauthority merge -
      export DISPLAY=$h$d
    }

  - Run xpdf.

Of course, this requires xpdf and a lot of X client stuff to
be installed on the (anything but X) server.

You could also try to scp the PDF to the desktop and run
xpdf there via ssh.

Bertram


-- 
Bertram Scharpf
Stuttgart, Deutschland/Germany
http://www.bertram-scharpf.de