[pdftex] simple pdftype program?

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 08:30:34PM -0400, Karl Berry wrote:

> Is there a simple program for pdf files which expands the binary parts
> of PDF files?  Kind of like dvitype.  It would be even nicer if it
> "interpreted" the PDF file the way dvitype does (showing the text being
> typeset as well as it can, etc.).
> 
> >From searching freshmeat, I found a Java package which can do it, but I
> don't have the right Java.
> http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/
> 
> Also found a Perl package which can probably do it, but it's not clear,
> and installing all the modules does not excite me.
> http://pdfapi2.sourceforge.net/
> 
> Anyone know of other alternatives?  Just wondering ...

Some time ago Markus Kohm has started a small project with alpha
status:
  http://people.freenet.de/kohm/markus/PDFTools.tar.gz

Perhaps "pdfreorg --optimization=0 --inflate-streams" can help you,
if you are only interested in decompressing streams with filter
/FlateDecode. Then the program adds a hex dump as PDF comment
after the compressed stream, eg:

70 0 obj
<<
[...]
>>
stream
[...]endstream
% 00000000: 31 20 30 20  30 20 31 20  32 38 2e 33  34 36 20 32  1 0 0 1 28.346 2
% 0x000010: 36 32 2e 36  36 32 20 63  6d 0a 30 20  67 20 30 20  62.662 cm.0 g 0 
[...]
endobj

If the pdf generation process can be changed, then the following
settings can be of help:
  pdfTeX: \pdfcompresslevel=0
  gs: -dCompressPages=false
      -dCompressFonts=false (?)
  dvipdfm: -z 0

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>
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