Bill McClain wrote:

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004 16:50:04 -0400 Alan Bowen wrote:

...

So, does anyone on the list have ideas about how to produce such files

from the files I currently have in hand or any experience with this sort of problem?

I have used the pdftotext utility, part of the xpdf package, for similar tasks. In the case of hyphenated line endings, the word will be hyphenated and broken across lines just as in the pdf, and that might be a problem for the reader program.

-Bill

From my own experience pdftotext also has trouble handling multicolumn documents. Adobe has an online utility for transforming PDF to html, which can rather easily be turned into text, which worked pretty well for me, breaking columns into something useful instead of mashing all the text together. Regards, Erik Hetzner

Bill, Erik, and Matthew— Thank you very much for the suggestions. I will explore pdftotext and the Acrobat “Save As” options. One of the problems for all—and perhaps it is insuperable—is the ability of such reading software to present phrases in foreign languages and mathematical expressions. I will report to you at least on what I discover. Best, Alan On Apr 14, 2004, at 7:44 PM, Matthew Huggett wrote:

You'd have to do it a file at a time, but does the Acrobat Reader's "save as text" function do what you need?

A much bigger solution would be to have your source as xml and then go from there to ConTeXt and pdf or straight to plain text via XSLT.

Matt

Alan Bowen wrote:

...

I have very recently launched a new journal which has been designed on the assumption that it will exist in both electronic form and in print—hence, it is produced using ConTeXt and exists natively in PDF files. This morning I was asked by a colleague who is totally blind whether it would be possible to for him have ASCII or .txt files that he could use easily with his screen reading software. (My sense is that he may be able to use PDF files with this software, but that it is not easy.)

So, does anyone on the list have ideas about how to produce such files from the files I currently have in hand or any experience with this sort of problem? Is there, for instance, a way to strip away all the formatting commands from a ConTeXt source file automatically so as to leave an unencoded .txt file that I could send him? I gather that he can use .htm files, but so far as I can tell there is no path from a ConTeXt source file to an HTML file—at least, a specific query about this made recently on this list by someone else seems to have gone unanswered.

Cheers, Alan _______________________________________________ ntg-context mailing list ntg-context@ntg.nl http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context

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