On Tuesday, October 28, 2025 09:34:02 AM Bigsy Bohr wrote:
I'm looking for a utility or such to change the number of characters in
lines of a .pdf file.
With what are you reading the PDF, because that's the straightforward
approach to your predicament?
I'm reading with Okular. If I enlarge the font (to be readable) the number of
characters per line remains the same but the line gets longer, leading to the
need to scroll horizontally (in the window or with my head / eyes) to read the
entire line.
PDF was meant to be a "finished document", ready to be printed onto
paper. It was not meant to be scaled for accessibility, reformatted for
varying output devices, and so on. What you saw was what you got.
It was also never meant to be edited. It's a read-only output product.
If you want to change a PDF, you get the original source material, in
whatever format it's written, make your edits there, and then regenerate
the PDF.
IIRC, if you use a tool to create a Kindle or B&N reader file, such as Mobi, it can re-wrap lines. I haven't found one that runs in Linux, but I have run one in Windoze in a virtual machine in a window on Debian Trizie.
Reading the wikipedia page, there's a section called "Logical structure
and accessibility", which says:
A tagged PDF (see clause 14.8 in ISO 32000) includes document
structure and semantics information to enable reliable text extraction
and accessibility.[33] Technically speaking, tagged PDF is a stylized
use of the format that builds on the logical structure framework
introduced in PDF 1.3. Tagged PDF defines a set of standard structure
types and attributes that allow page content (text, graphics, and
images) to be extracted and reused for other purposes.[34]
Tagged PDF is not required in situations where a PDF file is intended
only for print. Since the feature is optional, and since the rules
for tagged PDF were relatively vague in ISO 32000-1, support for
tagged PDF among consuming devices, including assistive technology
(AT), is uneven as of 2021.[35]