* Re: Doc-view fonts
[not found] ` <87lj4khlyd.fsf@engels.HistoricalMaterialism.info>
@ 2010-11-23 6:36 ` Tim X
2010-11-23 14:13 ` Haines Brown
0 siblings, 1 reply; 5+ messages in thread
From: Tim X @ 2010-11-23 6:36 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: help-gnu-emacs
Haines Brown <haines@HistoricalMaterialism.info> writes:
> Tim, your comments appreciated.
>
> Yes, the culprit is ghostscript, which renders a pdf with
> non-antialiased fonts. I looked at the manual and did some on-line
> searching, but found nothing about getting ghostscript to do any
> antialiasing. The gs option -dTextAlphaBits=4 did not help. None of the
> emacs options regarding doc-view appear relevant.
>
> I have a workable alternative, which is, while in sunrise-commander, to
> bring up emacs' shell, and then I need simply do ! and RET, for the
> default is the xpdf external program to run on the selected pdf
> file. The result of this is a readable PDF that has text that can copied
> and pasted (well, some older PDFs from the 1990s can't), and search
> works as one would expect.
>
> This is so easy, the obvious question is, why was the Doc-view mode
> created in the first place? Surely I'm not the only person who has tried
> to use it. It is rather useless at my end, and yet I don't find cries of
> complaint on line.
>
I don't use doc-view mode as I have my own solution. I've attached it
below as it may solve your requirements better. Essentially, it is a
simple mode that will convert various file formats to a text
representation in a buffer. While you do lose some of the formatting, I
find it useful when you just want to read the doc and possible cut/paste
from it.
It uses various external programs to do the work. I use a piece of
defadvice on the view-file procedure so that if I'm in dired and I hit
'v' to view one of the supported file types, it will automatically
convert it to text and display in the buffer. I also use the browse-url
package so that if I do a 'v' on an html document, it will render the
file with w3m.
Code is below. Hope it helps
Tim
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
;; Filename: /home/tcross/projects/emacs-convert/txutils.el
;; Creation Date: Wednesday, 20 September 2006 10:13 PM EST
;; Last Modified: Monday, 21 January 2008 01:15 PM EST
;; Version: 2.0
;; Author: Tim Cross <tcross@une.edu.au>
;; Description: Convert files from doc, ps, pdf, ppt to a format
;; which can be viewed within emacs (i.e. text or html)
;;; Copyright (C) 2006. Tim Cross <tcross@une.edu.au>
;;; All Rights Reserved.
;;;
;;; This file is not part of GNU Emacs, but the same permissions apply.
;;;
;;; GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
;;; it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
;;; the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
;;; any later version.
;;;
;;; GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
;;; but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
;;; MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
;;; GNU General Public License for more details.
;;;
;;; You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
;;; along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to
;;; the Free Software Foundation, 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
;;;
;;; Commentary
;;; ==========
;;;
;;; The very simple idea behind this basic utility is to make accessing
;;; files in .doc, .pdf, .ps and .ppt more easily accessible without
;;; having to leave emacs or manually convert the file format prior
;;; to being able to view the contents in emacs.
;;;
;;; There are packages which will enable calls to external viewers
;;; for files of specific formats, such as xpdf for pdf etc. However,
;;; I wanted to have everything within emacs as this makes integration,
;;; cutting/pasting etc a lot easier, plus as a blind user, most
;;; external utilities are of little use because they don't also include
;;; speech support.
;;;
;;; The objective here is to have things setup so that when browsing
;;; a directory with dired, you can just hit 'v' for any file you want to
;;; view and you will be presented with a text or html version without
;;; needing to do any manual conversion - or even careing about what
;;; would need to be done.
;;;
;;; You need the following packages (or at least utilities which will
;;; do the same thing). Most of these are fairly standard with many Linux
;;; distros these days.
;;; The wv utilities which contain wvText for converting MS Word docs
;;; The xpdf utilities which include pdftotext for converting PDF to text
;;; The Ghostscript package which contains pstotext for converting PS to text
;;; The ppthtml utility for converting MS Power Point files to html
;;; A configured and working browse-url setup. I use w3m as my browser
;;;
;;; Customizing
;;; ===========
;;;
;;; The easiest way to customize the conversion utility settings is to
;;; use M-x customize-group <RET> txutils <RET>
;;;
;;; In the txutils customize group, you will find just one setting, which
;;; is an alist of values indexed by a regular expression that matches against
;;; file extensions - a crude way of determining the source filetype
;;; (i.e. *.doc, *.pdf, *.ps, *.ppt, *.xls, *.html etc). See the
;;; documentation for more details.
;;;
;;; Installation
;;; ============
;;;
;;; Pretty straight forward. Place this file somewhere in your load path
;;; and put a (require 'txutils) in your .emacs. You may want to byte
;;; compile this file.
;;;
;;; Thanks
;;; ======
;;;
;;; A number of people provided suggestions on how to improve both my elisp
;;; and the program itself. In particular, thanks goes to
;;; Lukas Loehrer
;;; Vinicius Jose Latorre
;;; Andreas Roehler
;;;
;;; plus a few others who gave general suggestions, feedback and
;;; encouragement. Thanks to everyone for taking the time and putting
;;; in the effort, its greatly appreciated.
;;;
;;; Reporting Bugs
;;; ==============
;;;
;;; This is the first bit of elisp I've allowed out into the world and
;;; while I am really learning to love both elisp and cl lisp, I'm still
;;; very much a novice. Therefore, there IS bugs and probably some pretty
;;; poor style within this stuff. Feedback, bug reports and suggestions
;;; always welcome. Send e-mail to tcross@une.edu.au
;;;
(require 'custom)
(require 'browse-url)
; make-temp-file is part of apel prior to emacs 22
;(static-when (= emacs-major-version 21)
; (require 'poe))
(defgroup txutils nil
"Customize group for txutils."
:prefix "txutils-"
:group 'External)
(defcustom txutils-convert-alist
'( ;; MS Word
("\\.\\(?:DOC\\|doc\\)$" doc "/usr/bin/wvText" nil nil nil nil nil)
;; PDF
("\\.\\(?:PDF\\|pdf\\)$" pdf "/usr/bin/pdftotext" nil nil nil nil nil)
;; PostScript
("\\.\\(?:PS\\|ps\\)$" ps "/usr/bin/pstotext" "-output" t nil nil nil)
;; MS PowerPoint
("\\.\\(?:PPT\\|ppt\\)$" ppt "/usr/bin/ppthtml" nil nil nil t t))
"*Association for program convertion.
Each element has the following form:
(REGEXP SYMBOL CONVERTER SWITCHES INVERT REDIRECT-INPUT REDIRECT-OUTPUT HTML-OUTPUT)
Where:
REGEXP is a regexp to match file type to convert.
SYMBOL is a symbol to designate the fyle type.
CONVERTER is a program to convert the fyle type to text or HTML.
SWITCHES is a string which gives command line switches for the conversion
program. Nil means there are no switches needed.
INVERT indicates if input and output program option is to be
inverted or not. Non-nil means to invert, that is, output
option first then input option. Nil means do not invert,
that is, input option first then output option.
REDIRECT-INPUT indicates to use < to direct input from the input
file. This is useful for utilities which accept input
from stdin rather than a file.
REDIRECT-OUTPUT indicates to use > to direct output to the output
file. This is useful for utilities that only send output to
stdout.
HTML-OUTPUT Indicates the conversion program creates HTML output
rather than plain text."
:type '(repeat
(list :tag "Convertion"
(regexp :tag "File Type Regexp")
(symbol :tag "File Type Symbol")
(string :tag "Converter")
(choice :menu-tag "Output Option"
:tag "Output Option"
(const :tag "None" nil)
string)
(boolean :tag "Invert I/O Option")
(boolean :tag "Redirect Standard Input")
(boolean :tag "Redirect Standard Output")
(boolean :tag "HTML Output")))
:group 'txutils)
(defun txutils-run-command (cmd &optional output-buffer)
"Execute shell command with arguments, putting output in buffer."
(= 0 (shell-command cmd (if output-buffer
output-buffer
"*txutils-output*")
(if output-buffer
"*txutils-output*"))))
(defun txutils-quote-expand-file-name (file-name)
"Expand file name and quote special chars if required."
(shell-quote-argument (expand-file-name file-name)))
(defun txutils-file-alist (file-name)
"Return alist associated with file of this type."
(let ((al txutils-convert-alist))
(while (and al
(not (string-match (caar al) file-name)))
(setq al (cdr al)))
(if al
(cdar al)
nil)))
(defun txutils-make-temp-name (orig-name type-alist)
"Create a temp file name from original file name"
(make-temp-file (file-name-sans-extension
(file-name-nondirectory orig-name)) nil
(if (nth 7 type-alist)
".html"
".txt")))
(defun txutils-build-cmd (input-file output-file type-alist)
"Create the command string from conversion alist."
(let ((f1 (if (nth 3 type-alist)
output-file
input-file))
(f2 (if (nth 3 type-alist)
input-file
output-file)))
(concat
(nth 1 type-alist)
(if (nth 2 type-alist) ; Add cmd line switches
(concat " " (nth 2 type-alist)))
(if (nth 4 type-alist) ; redirect input (which may be output
(concat " < " f1) ; if arguments are inverted!)
(concat " " f1))
(if (nth 5 type-alist) ; redirect output (see above comment)
(concat " > " f2)
(concat " " f2)))))
(defun txutils-do-file-conversion (file-name)
"Based on file extension, convert file to text. Return name of text file"
(interactive "fFile to convert: ")
(let ((f-alist (txutils-file-alist file-name))
output-file)
(when f-alist
(message "Performing file conversion for %s." file-name)
(setq output-file (txutils-make-temp-name file-name f-alist))
(message "Command: %s" (txutils-build-cmd file-name output-file f-alist))
(if (txutils-run-command
(txutils-build-cmd (txutils-quote-expand-file-name file-name)
(txutils-quote-expand-file-name
output-file) f-alist))
output-file
file-name))))
(defadvice view-file (around txutils pre act comp)
"Perform file conversion or call web browser to view contents of file."
(let ((file-arg (ad-get-arg 0)))
(if (txutils-file-alist file-arg)
(ad-set-arg 0 (txutils-do-file-conversion file-arg)))
(if (string-match "\\.\\(?:HTML?\\|html?\\)$" (ad-get-arg 0))
(browse-url-of-file (ad-get-arg 0))
ad-do-it)))
(provide 'txutils)
--
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au
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