OpenSuSE has on line version of the documents and they generate the PDFs from upstream text/markup.
So, I am thinking, if you would be willing to participate in the project - it should be easily fixable either individually or by the project. I agree with your sentiment about bad design - damned be micro USB or micron sized safety writing on power bricks and million of other invisible things. That being said - complaining about Linux community is silly - we are the community and we are empowered to make any change we can imagine. Especially around here - PDX, home of Linux kernel. Tomas On Sep 27, 2017 7:54 PM, "Keith Lofstrom" <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, 26 Sep 2017, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > > Are there useful linux tools for reformatting third > > party PDF documents? > > On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 12:02:42PM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote: > > Try MasterPDFEditor <https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor/> > > Thanks Rich ... but I hope to find a /reformatter/, > not a GUI editing tool. Something like: > > pdffrob weirdfont.pdf -script replace.script > readable.pdf > > or just > > pdfreadable weirdfont.pdf > readable.pdf > > It might be possible to do this with pdfedit and a > "replace.script" by someone else far more obsessive > than I am. > > But overall, if we expect to be able to design safe > self-driving cars, we should be able to measure and > improve visual accessability automatically, especially > for algorithm-interpreted text formats like PDF. > > My vision is aging, so I'm becoming more aware of this. > I imagine that some of these "stylishly" formatted > documents are unreadable for the visually impaired. > > And yes, I'm aware of screen magnifiers. Better than > nothing, but merely replacing an awful handicap with a > very annoying one. > > Back when open source was progressive, we cared about > the underserved. I guess this is all just a job now, > with legal departments to smack down the complainers. > > Keith > > P.S. What I did for the SUSE document is burst the pdf > into 600 DPI page images, piped through GIMP to fuzz then > sharpen and darken the letters, then reassemble as a pdf. > It was about 10 minutes of work, but it doubled > readability. I can imagine scripting it if I encounter > many more documents like that. The tool I would like > would "intelligently" extract and reformat the text > and build new pages, with a control for minimum size; > 30 point letters for the almost-blind, like my sister. > > -- > Keith Lofstrom [email protected] > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
