On Tue, 26 Sep 2017, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > Are there useful linux tools for reformatting third > party PDF documents?
On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 12:02:42PM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote: > Try MasterPDFEditor <https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor/> Thanks Rich ... but I hope to find a /reformatter/, not a GUI editing tool. Something like: pdffrob weirdfont.pdf -script replace.script > readable.pdf or just pdfreadable weirdfont.pdf > readable.pdf It might be possible to do this with pdfedit and a "replace.script" by someone else far more obsessive than I am. But overall, if we expect to be able to design safe self-driving cars, we should be able to measure and improve visual accessability automatically, especially for algorithm-interpreted text formats like PDF. My vision is aging, so I'm becoming more aware of this. I imagine that some of these "stylishly" formatted documents are unreadable for the visually impaired. And yes, I'm aware of screen magnifiers. Better than nothing, but merely replacing an awful handicap with a very annoying one. Back when open source was progressive, we cared about the underserved. I guess this is all just a job now, with legal departments to smack down the complainers. Keith P.S. What I did for the SUSE document is burst the pdf into 600 DPI page images, piped through GIMP to fuzz then sharpen and darken the letters, then reassemble as a pdf. It was about 10 minutes of work, but it doubled readability. I can imagine scripting it if I encounter many more documents like that. The tool I would like would "intelligently" extract and reformat the text and build new pages, with a control for minimum size; 30 point letters for the almost-blind, like my sister. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
