I happen to read my email through a ssh connection on an Unix or sometimes a Linux system of my university. In order to view a pdf file, I have to save the attached file and use sftp to download the file to my desktop if I want to read it using a graphical pdf viewer.
Fortunately, there is a command line alternative even for reading pdf files! These can of course be used not only in a remote system over a ssh connection, but in any lightweight Linux system, even with a system with no X installed.
Ps2ascii uses Ghostscript for the conversion. It can convert both PostScript and PDF to ASCII text. It does not produce perfectly formatted output, but is certainly good enough for a quick & dirty conversion to have a glance at the textual content of a pdf file as the screenshot of Debian Reference shows.
2 comments:
I think you can convert pdf to html and then use any of the text web browser like w3m to view the resulting files. I have found a script here to do the same work for you. Thanks
http://linuxtuts.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-to-view-pdf-file-from-console-in.html
The tool "pdftotext" from the package poppler-utils in another good alternative. It can even approximate the original layout of the document with the option "-layout".
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