Re: [orca-list] a suggestion to solve pdf reading with orca.

[Hermann <meinelisten onlinehome de>]

On 09.10.2008 at 16:26:44 "Krishnakant Mane" <hackingkk gmail com> wrote:

> On 09/10/2008, Willie Walker <William Walker sun com> wrote:
> > Hi Krishnakant:
> >
> > > Now with the given problem, I have a suggestion.
> > > Why don't we try and create a rudimentary gtk based simple pdf reader.
> > > It could be as simple as a text editor.  all that is urgently needed
> > > is to read a pdf file and get its font information and other
> > > attributes like bold italics and size of the font.
> >
> > You might be able to accomplish this with pdftohtml which is part of the
> > poppler-utils package on Ubuntu.  That is, run pdftohtml and then bring the
> > results up in Firefox.
> Hi wili,  Again the problem is that font attributes can't be read by
> orca in firefox.  So apart from headings, list etc we don't get any
> extra info out from html.  So bringing the pdf file down to html will
> still not help.
I just tested a few things with pdftohtml, and I view it not that
useless. There is no font information, which indeed is inconvenient. But
this program structures complicated PDF documents in a way you can
quicly view them and get, for example, to the page you want to read;
this is especially useful when reading books in PDF.
Another advantage is the reading of tables, useful when reading bills,
send to you in PDF (in my case the monthly bill of my phone provider,
the German Telecom).

> > If you want to write your own PDF viewer from scratch, the main thing it is
> > going to need is caret navigation and an accessible text implementation.
> > So, if
> > this is all that Evince needs to make it accessible, perhaps it might
> > require
> > less work overall to just add these things to Evince?
> Ok, that sounds sensible to mee as well.
> Can you provide more details?

I think it is always a good idea to have alternatives, so I want to
encourage you in making Evince accessible.
Hermann