Re: [orca-list] Orca and Acrobat Reader not cooperating

[Jacob Schmude <j schmude gmail com>]

Hi
I know about getting text from PDFs, but that isn't always an option.  
I don't, at the moment, require access to acrobat reader as I can use  
the pdf-to-text hacks, or even quicker just copy/paste the entire text  
from Evince into Openoffice or Gedit. But there are some PDFs that  
just don't work with anything but acrobat reader, and I wanted to get  
that set up in case I encountered one of these, as I sometimes do  
particularly with certain types of ebooks.



On Jan 29, 2009, at 13:09, James Dietz wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Google foxyfir; it's a package of blind-friendly stuff I ran across
> randomly the other day.  In the document I found describing it it
> mentioned several command-line tools for extracting text from PDFs.
> There's also an article on the orca wiki describing a hack to get text
> from PDFs using evince (I think it just involved hitting ctrl+a to
> select all and copying it to somewhere else).  I haven't tried
> acroread (too scared, especially since adobe flash plugin locked up
> orca when I tried to install it through the firefox plugin finder
> thing and I don't like adobe much on non-windows platforms anyway).
>
> Nolan, Firefox works fine on the toshiba; I do get a totally random
> orca crash sometimes (I'm using gnome-speech) but rebooting orca works
> just fine.  I've bought a new eeepc (see my thread) and firefox is a
> lot more snotty - crashes orca, works very slowly, plus when orca
> disappears it doesn't want to come back until I reboot the whole
> computer (rebooting X doesn't work like it usually does).  In my other
> thread I thought this was a problem encountered when using Orca
> normally, but I've localized it to firefox.  Speech-dispatcher would
> crash to the dummy module (which is only slightly better than no
> speech) and gnome-speech just disappears altogether.  I have to go
> extra slow with firefox to get it to pretend to play nice.
>
> On 1/29/09, nolan <nolan thewordnerd info> wrote:
> > This doesn't help directly with your issue, but I have experienced  
> > this
> > behavior with other applications, though I've been too lazy to set up
> > orca's logging to help debug it, especially as I can't reliably
> > duplicate it. If you can, though, I hope you file a bug report. :)
> >
> > Sometimes it seems like apps block all accessibility information.  
> > This
> > isn't quite the "closing windows locks up the desktop" issue,  
> > because I
> > can still use the desktop, and if I use my terminal hotkey, kill Orca
> > and then usually restart Speech-dispatcher for good measure, I get
> > speech back. I notice that it often seems to happen with Firefox,  
> > but I
> > can't reliably duplicate it as you can.
> >
> >
> > On 01/29/2009 10:47 AM, Jacob Schmude wrote:
> > > Hi List
> > > I'm experiencing this in both Ubuntu 8.10 and the 9.04 alpha. I've
> > > tried both the packages from Adobe and those from the Medibuntu
> > > repositories with the same result.
> > > When I launch Acrobat reader the first time, I can accept the  
> > > license
> > > agreement. When I do so, however, Orca no longer speaks. Relaunching
> > > Orca doesn't help, and the only thing that does is killing the  
> > > Acrobat
> > > reader process. From then on, launching Acrobat reader triggers  
> > > this.
> > > I've had the screen looked at and can verify from my system's  
> > > behavior
> > > that nothing is locked, including Acrobat reader itself. It seems
> > > almost as though Acrobat reader is somehow blocking accessibility
> > > information from getting to Orca, though I'm not sure if that's even
> > > possible. I can do nothing with Orca until the acrobat reader  
> > > process
> > > is killed, but my system operates normally in every other way. One
> > > interesting fact, and no idea if it's relevant, but I need to send a
> > > sigkill to the acroread process, simply using the kill command is  
> > > not
> > > enough. This is with Acrobat reader 8.1.3, is there another  
> > > version I
> > > should use? Or is something else happening? Any ideas?
> > >
> > > Thanks
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >   The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a
> > > thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot
> > > possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible  
> > > to
> > > get at or repair.
> > >    --Douglas Adams
> > >
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> >
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   The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a  
thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot  
possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to  
get at or repair.
        --Douglas Adams