Viewing the Text in PDFs in Terminal
------------------------------------

On MacOSX sometimes it is nice to be able to view / search the 
text in a PDF in Terminal, instead of in Preview or another GUI 
application.  

Preliminary Notes
-----------------

These steps assume that MacPorts (https://www.macports.org/) is 
installed in its default location (/opt/local) and that 
/opt/local/bin and /opt/local/sbin are in your $PATH.

Steps
-----

1. Install xpdf and xpdf-tools through MacPorts:

   $ sudo port install xpdf-tools

   or

   Install poppler through MacPorts:

   $ sudo port install poppler
 
2. Configure the default papersize ('letter' for me):

   $ sudo paperconfig -p letter

   This may not be necessary if pdftotext from poppler
   is being used.

3. Use pdftotext to extract and view the text in a PDF:

   $ pdftotext -layout -nopgbrk [PDF] - | less

   where [PDF] is the path to the PDF to be viewed. 

   The '-layout' option tells pdftotext to try to preserve the 
   formatting / layout in the PDF (an alternative to this is 
   the '-table' option), and the '-nopgbrk' option tells 
   pdftotext to not insert pagebreaks (^L).

4. (Optional) To wrap the output to 75 columns, use fold or fmt:

   $ pdftotext -layout -nopgbrk [PDF] - | fold -w 75 -s | less

   or

   $ pdftotext -layout -nopgbrk [PDF] - | fmt -w 75 -ps | less

   If the [PDF] file contains non-ascii characters, fold or fmt may 
   abort, in which case we can specify LC_ALL=C as an enviroment
   variable to fold or fmt:

   $ pdftotext -layout -nopgbrk [PDF] - | LC_ALL=C fold -w 75 -s | less

   or

   $ pdftotext -layout -nopgbrk [PDF] - | LC_ALL=C fmt -w 75 -ps | less

   See: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/475548

References
----------

https://www.xpdfreader.com/index.html
https://github.com/freedesktop/poppler
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3570591
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/25173
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/systemd/general/libpaper.html
https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-paperconfig/

History
-------

v.0.1.3 03/19/2022 - Add note that configuring paper size may not be 
                     needed if pdftotext from poppler is used
v.0.1.2 03/18/2022 - Update to add references to poppler (dervied from
                     xpdf)
v.0.1.1 03/18/2022 - Update with notes about non-ascii characters in 
                     a PDF
v.0.1.0 03/18/2022 - Initial version