Ted, See if you can get a copy of Star Office 5.2 which was available for OS/2. I thinka all these Star office (i.e. Open Office nowadays) programs were originally ported FROM OS/2... Anyway I used Star Office 5.2 for OS/2 & I think even version 6 may hav had an OS/2 port as well.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- snipped-for-privacy@boltblue.com John Lloyd - Cymru/Wales
Hmm ... first take a look at xpdf. I'll quote some of the man page for that here (and some others as well):
====================================================================== NAME xpdf - Portable Document Format (PDF) file viewer for X (version 1.01)
SYNOPSIS xpdf [options] [PDF-file [page | +dest]]
DESCRIPTION Xpdf is a viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. (These are also sometimes also called 'Acrobat' files, from the name of Adobe's PDF software.) Xpdf runs under the X Window System on UNIX, VMS, and OS/2.
[ ... ]
-ps PS-file Set the default file name for PostScript output. This can also be of the form '|command' to pipe the PostScript through a command. [config file: psFile]
[ ... ]
-level1 Generate Level 1 PostScript. The resulting PostScript files will be significantly larger (if they contain images), but will print on Level 1 printers. This also converts all images to black and white. [config file: psLevel]
[ ... ]
-opw password Specify the owner password for the PDF file. Providing this will bypass all security restrictions.
-upw password Specify the user password for the PDF file.
So -- this will (among other things) convert a .pdf file to a .ps (PostScript) file.
Also (as part of the xpdf package) you get:
====================================================================== NAME pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 1.01)
DESCRIPTION Pdftotext converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text.
Pdftotext reads the PDF file, PDF-file, and writes a text file, text-file. If text-file is not specified, pdftotext converts file.pdf to file.txt. If text-file is '-', the text is sent to stdout.
[ ... ]
-raw Keep the text in content stream order. This is a hack which often "undoes" column formatting, etc. This option will likely be replaced with something more sophisticated when pdftotext is rewritten to use a smarter text placement algorithm.
-htmlmeta Generate a simple HTML file, including the meta infor- mation. This simply wraps the text in and and prepends the meta headers.
[ ... ]
-opw password Specify the owner password for the PDF file. Providing this will bypass all security restrictions.
-upw password Specify the user password for the PDF file.
DESCRIPTION Pdftops converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to PostScript so they can be printed.
Pdftops reads the PDF file, PDF-file, and writes a PostScript file, PS-file. If PS-file is not specified, pdftops converts file.pdf to file.ps (or file.eps with the -eps option). If PS-file is '-', the PostScript is sent to stdout.
[ ... ]
-level1 Generate Level 1 PostScript. The resulting PostScript files will be significantly larger (if they contain images), but will print on Level 1 printers. This also converts all images to black and white. No more than one of the PostScript level options (-level1, -level1sep, -level2, -level2sep, -level3, -level3Sep) may be given. [config file: psLevel]
-level1sep Generate Level 1 separable PostScript. All colors are converted to CMYK. Images are written with separate stream data for the four components. [config file: psLevel]
-level2 Generate Level 2 PostScript. Level 2 supports color images and image compression. This is the default set- ting. [config file: psLevel]
-level2sep Generate Level 2 separable PostScript. All colors are converted to CMYK. The PostScript separation conven- tion operators are used to handle custom (spot) colors. [config file: psLevel]
-level3 Generate Level 3 PostScript. This enables all Level 2 features plus CID font embedding. [config file: psLevel]
-level3Sep Generate Level 3 separable PostScript. The separation handling is the same as for -level2Sep. [config file: psLevel]
-eps Generate an Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) file. An EPS file contains a single image, so if you use this option with a multi-page PDF file, you must use -f and -l to specify a single page. No more than one of the mode options (-eps, -form) may be given.
If you go to text, you will lose the fancy formatting, but if you can work on PostScript, you should be able to preserve it. (I don't know any programs which will open PostScript for formatted editing, though if you know enough about PostScript, you can edit the file raw.
Note, however, that if the PDF page happens to simply be an encoding of an image (such as from scans), you won't get the raw text, unless you have a program which can do OCR on the image.
For going the other way, you have enscript (to just turn a plain text file into plain PostScript), or groff (to turn a file with nroff/troff formatting commands embedded into PostScript).
====================================================================== User Commands GROFF(1)
NAME groff - front end for the groff document formatting system
DESCRIPTION groff is a front-end to the groff document formatting sys- tem. Normally it runs the gtroff program and a postproces- sor appropriate for the selected device. Available devices are:
NAME ps2pdf - Convert PostScript to PDF using ghostscript ps2pdf12 - Convert PostScript to PDF 1.2 (Acrobat 3-and- later compatible) using ghostscript ps2pdf13 - Convert PostScript to PDF 1.3 (Acrobat 4-and- later compatible) using ghostscript
DESCRIPTION The ps2pdf scripts are work-alikes for nearly all the func- tionality (but not the user interface) of Adobe's Acrobat(TM) Distiller(TM) product: they convert PostScript files to Portable Document Format (PDF) files. ======================================================================
All of these can be compiled to run on linux, or you may be able to find RPMs or other pre-packaged binaries, depending on your flavor of linux.
Note that the xpdf package even includes OS-2 in its list of OS's which it will run under, so Ted should be happy -- if he can pull himself away from APL long enough to run a C compiler. :-)
Unfortunately, Adobe released a version of Acrobat (5.0?) that does that as the *default*. It is a real PITA in some cases. If they just use the default setting, it can be removed quickly and easily, but it would probably be a violation of the rather draconian DMCA..
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