[plug] PDF in Linux

[Craig Ringer]

>>Can anyone tell me a decent PDF viewer for Linux, one which supports 
>>copy and paste out of the PDF, like the Adobe viewer for win32?
> 
>>What does everyone else use for PDF viewing?
> 
> acroread. Can be downloaded from Adobe website. With Linux, it is
> available for 32-bit Intel platforms, at least. Your OS might offer
> an installation package, too.

If you're running a recent distro that uses a utf-8 locale (to find out, 
type "locale" at a terminal and see if it says .utf8 in the output) 
you'll need to modify the acroread start script a bit, too. Just insert

LC_ALL=C
LANG=C

into the top of the /usr/local/Acrobat5/bin/acroread script.

The Linux version of Acrobat Reader is from the old major version, and 
lacks the search facilities of the win32 version (*arrggh*). It's still 
much better than the other PDF readers, though xpdf can be very useful 
for copying and pasting blocks of text from a PDF. If only they'd fix 
the locale crash bug. It's based on Motif, and apparently motif apps 
often don't like utf8 locales (as well as being ugly and clunky).

When it comes to copy and paste, you /should/ be able to use xpdf for 
it, assuming you're copying and pasting text. I prefer the way it 
handles it to the way acrobat reader does, often - I can grab a number 
of columns as-is with xpdf.

Craig Ringer

_______________________________________________
plug mailing list
plug at plug.linux.org.au
http://mail.plug.linux.org.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/plug