Re: PDF reader that overrides fonts
On Fri, Jun 06, 2008 at 15:26:22 +0200, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
> On 2008-06-06 14:24, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > I have 20-odd PDF's that I must read. They have a terrible
> > handwritten-type font embedded in them and I cannot read them! The
> > PDFs are text, not images, as I've been able to copy the text and
> > paste to OpenOffice successfully. However, the documents are Materials
> > Engineering documents with charts and diagrams, so simply copying and
> > pasting the whole thing is unacceptable. Is there a PDF reader that
> > lets one override the embedded fonts?
>
> If it's just that they look unreadable on screen, you could try a
> different pdf reader. I've had the experience that some strange
> bitmapped fonts look better on acroread (from [1]) than on kpdf, xpdf.
>
> I don't know how to replace the fonts, but maybe you could have a look at:
>
> pstoedit - a tool converting PostScript and PDF files into various
> vector graphic formats
>
> skencil, inkscape are programs to edit svg.
>
> (Have not tried it myself)
I think inkscape is by far the best tool for this job, provided that you
use version 0.46 (available in Lenny and Sid). It can read PDFs directly
and convert their content to fully-editable text blocks, vector graphics
or embedded bitmaps (depending on how the individual elements were
embedded in the original PDF). It will probably replace the embedded
non-standard font with a standard one automatically. You should then be
able to change font size, positioning of the text blocks, etc. as if you
had created this document yourself with inkscape. If you find that the
spacing of the letters is strange then you might have to make use of
"Text > Remove Manual Kerns".
--
Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
Florian |
Reply to: