Converting pdfs

[lazer100]

On 29-Oct-12 23:51:52 lazer100 wrote:


>and to convert to ascii is a tricky command line:

>gs -q -dNODISPLAY -dSAFER -dDELAYBIND -dWRITESYSTEMDICT -dSIMPLE "" -c save
-f
>ps2ascii.ps input.pdf -c quit >output.txt

>the "" is any further gs command line options you may want, as "" it means
>none,
>I have put it there as a placemarker in case you wanted some, eg to print
>pages 11 to 23 you would use further options "-dFirstPage=11 -dLastPage=23"

testing this out, you need to omit the ""'s eg to convert pages 11 to 23 to
ascii, use all on one line, with \ denoting line continuation:

gs -q -dNODISPLAY -dSAFER -dDELAYBIND \
-dWRITESYSTEMDICT -dSIMPLE \
-dFirstPage=11 -dLastPage=23 \
-c save -f ps2ascii.ps input_document.pdf \
-c quit >output_document.txt 

converting to ascii can be useful where the document index is 
not reliable.