[PLUG] Tweaking PDFs, font size and color

[Tomas Kuchta]

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" <keithl at kl-ic.com> 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          keithl at keithl.com
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG mailing list
> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
>