Re: Viewing PDFs as text?

[Tassilo Horn]

"Roland Winkler" <Roland.Winkler@physik.uni-erlangen.de> writes:

Hi Roland,

> On Wed Mar 19 2008 Tassilo Horn wrote:
>> > would it make sense to have a variable like
>> > `doc-view-default-action' so that I can open a pdf file in a tty
>> > and get immediately the text buffer?
>> 
>> That could be done, but I don't think it would be a good idea,
>> because it opens a new buffer that has nothing to do with doc-view
>> and that could confuse users.  And IMO C-x C-f /path/to/file RET C-c
>> C-t isn't too hard to type.
>> 
>> BTW, if you only use emacs in a terminal and don't use doc-view at
>> all, there's a package named txutils [1] that will fit your needs
>> better.
>
> I just ran into this old email.
>
> emacs-w3m now uses doc-view as its default viewer for pdf file.
> Certainly this makes sense.  It would appear useful to me if for such
> an environment doc-view provided a unified and consistent interface
> for viewing pdf files both for emacs running under X and emacs running
> in a tty.

Unified & consistent interface implies that all keystrokes need to have
the same effect, that you can jump to a given page, etc.  Currently
these "text content buffers" only show the result of running pdftotext
on the document using text-mode.  And IMO text-mode is most appropriate
in that situation.

I think most of the time nobody wants to view a pdf/ps/dvi as plain
text.  So my general advice would be: Use doc-view in X11 frames, but do
something different on terminal frames.  If X is running one could use
the users preferred app or popup a new X11 emacs frame running doc-view.
If X isn't running, then the current behavior of doc-view seems
appropriate to me.

But feel free to suggest a better approach.  Maybe you can think of a
better way.

Bye,
Tassilo