Re: [g-a-devel]Re: Ghost-View(ggv): Extracting text from GtkGs Widget

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Rajkumar Sivasamy <rajkumar siva wipro com> writes:

> Hi Mukund,
> 
> I tried using "prescript" tool to convert postscript to text and html. The
> text generated by this tool is well
> formatted, but it cannot reproduce an image or non ASCII symbols like
> "infinity" from the postscript document.

Postscript is difficult to make accessible by it's very nature;  there
is no concept of an alt tag; there is no inherent text flow, etc.
Ghostscript has a mode where it tries to extract ascii text on it's
own.  I think doing any better then that is basically impossible, and
it's a limitation of the format.  PDF is a lot better for this, but not
as good as other formats.

> In terms of accessibility, the converted text can be used by an AT to
> replicate the postscript document to user, but
> the limitation is that the image and non ASCII symbols can't be reproduced.

I think your best bet here is to take the gtkgs widget, and extend it a
bit to get ghostscript to pass back text.  I don't know how flexible
ghostscript is; you may need to do it in a separate process,
unfortunately.  The ps2ascii script would be a place to start.

Good luck,
-Jonathan