----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Pattison" <srp@bigpond.net.au> To: <gui-talk@nfbnet.org> Sent: Friday, January 17, 2003 5:06 PM Subject: Fwd: pdf conversion details and options From: Aaron Howell aaron@kitten.net.au To: vip-l@softspeak.com.au There's a really neet way of converting locked pdf files to text without paying a cent, and without having to wait for scanning software to do its thing. The below assumes a basic knowledge of C, and either that you have access to a Linux box, or that you have a copy of cygwin and know how to use it. The program which runs the pdf2txt email service at the trace centre is called pdftotext, and its part of a suite called xpdf, which is a free alternative to acrobat reader designed to run under Xwindows. The nice thing about xpdf is that there's source code available and its very readable. There is only 1 place (or two if you want the pretty gui interface) where the program has to be patched to disable the security check and go ahead and decode the file whether its locked or not. Its as simple as commenting out 1 if statement (and if you're committed enough to free access to your pdf documents, you will be able to find it from there). Once you make the necessary change(s), its as simple as ./configure make make install. (with appropriate tweaks to the build process if running under cygwin.) The whole process took me about 10 minutes from unpacking the source to happily reading locked pdf files, and most of that time was build process. So there's an alternative to having to pay to have your files unlocked. (Adobe really ought to allow locked files to be accessed within acrobat reader with jaws and window eyes if they want people to take their accessibility effort seriously, otherwise they're a bit of a joke). Regards Aaron Regards Steve mailto:srp@bigpond.net.au MSN Messenger: Internetuser383@hotmail.com