Hello Martin,

I wonder what Google do?  They seem to be able to search PDF documents, and 
provide equivalent text.  The translation is not always perfect, but may be 
as good as other ways.  If there's a better way, I'm sure Google would want 
to know!  Anybody know of one?

Google might also be able to provide a facility for translation directly, 
e.g. just by sending your PDF document to a site.  Does anybody know?  (At 
present they seem only able to translate PDF which is already on the web.)

Cheers,

John

John Nissen
Cloudworld Ltd - http://www.cloudworld.co.uk
maker of the assistive reader, WordAloud.
Try WordAloud with synthetic phonics:
http://www.cloudworld.co.uk/teaching-synthetic-phonics.htm
Tel: +44 208 742 3170  Fax: +44 208 742 0202
Email: [log in to unmask]



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Martin McCormick" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, June 10, 2006 2:27 PM
Subject: Re: [EASI] PDF accessibility


> Chris von See writes:
>>Unfortunately I don't know of any good command line utilities to read
>>PDFs.  The only thing I can suggest is to download something like PDFBox
>>(http:/www.pdfbox.org); although it is a developer's kit it also has a
>>command line utility called ExtractText that can pull the text from a
>>PDF and dump it to a file for perusal using your favorite editor or
>>piping into the "more" utility.  There are probably other utilities like
>>PDFBox out there, but PDFBox is the only one I have direct hands-on
>>experience with.
>
> Thank you, once again.  I think that generally the
> command line world is slowly working a little better as time goes
> by.  For many things, it still beats anything else as far as ease
> of use and the ability to turn complex actions in to scripts
> which is something else one can't do with purely graphical
> applications.
>
> Thanks for saving me the pure frustration of further trying to
> shake loose the very heart of what Adobe's web site claims it is
> trying to let us have.  It may be my imagination, but there may
> not be quite as many of those really terrible sites around these
> days as there used to be, but for us lynx users, there are still
> a  lot.  lynx is a great html engine, but it falls flat on
> javascript.  For that matter, the other text browsers that do
> some javascript never seem to get along well either.  They just
> fail further along the way.
>
> The job that I have revolves around the UNIX command line
> and all the filters such as awk, sed, the grep family, perl and
> C, etc, so utilities like the one you mentioned or catdoc which
> can read MS-Word documents are like finding gold.  At the risk of
> straying from the subject, there is kind of a
> measures/countermeasures feel to being able to read information.
> I remember being thrilled that I could finally read Microsoft
> Word attachments to Email.  I kid you not.  The next day, some
> message came out with an attachment.  I opened it and this one
> had a MSO or Microsoft Office extension.  The tower of Babel is
> alive and well.
>
> Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK
> Systems Engineer
> OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group
>
>