Apologies, Martin - I didn't realize you were exclusively a command line user.

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.


Cheers
Chris

Martin McCormick wrote:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite">
Chris von See writes:
  
Adobe has a Linux version of their reader, and in addition to ghostview 
there are now PDF readers for KDE and Gnome.

For more info, take a look at 
http://www.linuxheadquarters.com/howto/apps/acrobat.shtml
    

	Does acrobat work in command line mode?

	I made about 5 runs at Adobe's site.  It starts out
innocently enough in that you can get to the selector engine and
choose your OS.  After reaching linux.tar.gz, I hit the right
arrow and then Enter which often-times makes your selection in
the type of selector they had there.  I then was asked to choose
a language and it is even defaulted to English.  I did that and
then couldn't seem to get free of the language selector or do
anything that moved on to the next step.  I don't know if I ever
selected English or not.

	I never got a download and, after reading the discussion
at the linuxheadquarters URL, I am not sure it would have been
of any use.

	If you have to have X windows or any other GUI running to
use acrobat, it is not an option for those of us who use the
command line.  The GUI environment in Linux is getting closer to
true usability all the time, but I hear it is not quite there yet
in many cases.  The ps2ascii utility uses the UNIX standard
output function and thus works in the command line mode when it
isn't stumbling over the document it is attempting to read.

	Some applications in UNIX will produce text output if X
isn't running so if the Linux version of acrobat can, it is worth
a try.

	Thanks for the information.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group


  

-- 

Chris von See
Senior Geek
TechAdapt, Inc.
http://www.techadapt.com
Phone: 360-223-1514
E-mail: [log in to unmask]