[PLUG] Tweaking PDFs, font size and color

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Thu Sep 28 02:52:31 UTC 2017


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          keithl at keithl.com



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