Hello John, I can tell you about two programs. I use both in debian and both simply do the job for me. They even read strange pdf files that i can't open with acrobat 6 with accessibility for win. Both of them use ghostscript. GNU ghostscript has a GPL license. (www.gnu.org/directory/ghostscript.html). There's also ADFL gs which has a slightly different license. 1 - the first one, ps2ascii, is very simple, and works well for me. It's included in ghostscript (debian package gs-common). #!/bin/sh # $RCSfile: ps2ascii,v $ $Revision: 1.2.2.1 $ # Extract ASCII text from a PostScript file. Usage: # ps2ascii [infile.ps [outfile.txt]] # If outfile is omitted, output goes to stdout. # If both infile and outfile are omitted, ps2ascii acts as a filter, # reading from stdin and writing on stdout. trap "rm -f _temp_.err _temp_.out" 0 1 2 15 OPTIONS="-q -dNODISPLAY -dSAFER -dNOBIND -dWRITESYSTEMDICT -dSIMPLE" if ( test $# -eq 0 ) then gs $OPTIONS -c save -f ps2ascii.ps - -c quit elif ( test $# -eq 1 ) then gs $OPTIONS -c save -f ps2ascii.ps $1 -c quit else gs $OPTIONS -c save -f ps2ascii.ps $1 -c quit >$2 fi 2 - pstotext is a bit more sophisticated and tries to do better formatting. Debian package: pstotext. http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/pstotext.htm. It's not a GPL licence, but is should be similar; otherwise why did good precise debian folks put it in the main distribution? leo _______________________________________________ Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list