Re: [orca-list] PDF reader

[Mallory van Achterberg <stommepoes stommepoes nl>]

Before anyone tries to answer that, are these normal PDFs or are they
created with some special Adobe-only thing?

I recently had to sign up for a government program which required
that I read stuff in PDF format. Gnome document viewer was fine for
many of them, but the one which I was "required" to read would only
display the text telling me I needed to "update" to a newer version
of Adobe Reader. This PDF seems to have been created in a version of
Adobe from 2006, and it seems to check for some special Adobe marking.
I don't know what. The "real" text is in the file, but if it does not
"see" this special Adobe something it will only display "upgrade
Adobe Reader" text.
Google docs could not display the real text, nor the Gimp after the
file was converted to ppm (Gimp has Ghostwriter inside now, which can
read PostScript), and vim only showed that indeed all the actual 
information was there, encoded in PostScript. pdf to text also did
nothing. (If anyone has any idea how to get around this, or what
this problem is even called, it would be awesome)

If your school PDFs are normal, then you have a variety of tools to
check out, but if they actually really require Adobe to open them,
you'll want a Windows machine or Mac available. I'm stuck using a
Virtual Box with Windows XP to read the Adobe PDFs.

Also how accessible the PDFs themselves are depends somewhat on how
they were made.

cheers,
Mallory

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 02:42:18AM -0500, Andy B wrote:
> Is there a pdf reader that is accessible in linux? I need it for school.