[Gllug] PDFs

[Tethys]

Peter Childs writes:

>> Adobe's is big and closed source, also the mouse wheel doesn't work
>> Kghostview doesn't support text grabbing neither does xpdf (shame because I
>> like it!)
>
>Here's an intresting idea.
>
>pdf2ps -> ps2ascii

Yes, but that'll do the whole document. Not too useful if you only want
to copy and paste a sentence or two. Note that it's provably impossible
to provide copy and paste from a PDF document 100% of the time. Adobe does
it by making certain assumptions about how the page is contructed, which
generally hold true if you use Acrobat Writer, and indeed most other means
of creating a PDF file. But it's relatively easy to create a PDF file from
which you can't copy and paste. Indeed, I'm surprised no one's written a
tool to do it automatically, for those paranoid copyright holders that
would remove our fair use rights...

Tet

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