Here is a program for converting PDF files into a format that "plucker" (an offline web browser) can display.

Usage is like:

/Dcs/seki/strombrg/bin/pdftopdb [-w pdbwidth] [-h pdbheight] [-W altpdbwidth] [-H altpdbheight] [-m maxdepth] [-b bpp] [-C] -p inpdffile [-c outpdbcategory] -d outpdbfile [-l]
-m maxdepth gives how deeply plucker-build should recursively traverse links
-b bpp defines the number of pixels in the output images
-C tells this script to output a color pdb, not greyscale
-l convert pdf with a low number of (forced) distinct shades of gray
-D output debugging information

Example usage:
Here we're converting a PDF file that contains some maps and uses some very small fonts, so for this file we had to increase the pixels per inch with -r, and then generate a pretty high resolution .pdb using -H and -W, but for most pdf files, you won't need to specify -r, -H or -W. For this file, because we've specified -H and -W but not -h or -w, the .pdb will initially show a scaled down version of all pages (images), but then you can click on those small images (you might think of them as largish thumbnails - about the size of a PalmOS 5 hires display), then you'll find yourself viewing a scrollable, high resolution version of the page.

Bugs

  1. The pdf's generated are not searchable



Hits: 3287
Timestamp: 2024-04-24 22:50:52 PDT

Back to Dan's tech tidbits

You can e-mail the author with questions or comments: