Board:   [fsxNet] Mystic BBS discussion/support
Subject: rudimentary pdf viewing
From:    Codefenix(21:4/141)
Date:    Thu Mar 05, 2026 16:41

  Re: rudimentary pdf viewing
  By: fusion to All on Wed Mar 04 2026 03:24 am

 fu> included in the xpdf tools collection is pdftotext.exe which as the name
 fu> suggests can convert pdf files to a plain text format.

I've used this. We have some work projects that make use of Poppler's pdftotext.exe tool.

 fu> afterwards go in and try and view a PDF file. obviously simpler stuff will
 fu> work better. <snip>

Yes, this is very true. Most of the time, the text output doesn't resemble the PDF source at all, even if the PDF source is entirely text. PDF files made up entirely of embedded images won't work at all, as you'd likely guess.

It's really best suited for light data-scraping, and not much else.

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