Did you know that you could view text-based PDFs on the command line?

Well, maybe you did, but I didn't!

The other day, I was surfing away and in the comments on some website (I 
should have bookmarked it but didn't), some amazing person wrote 
something like, "Oh, I just use 'lesspipe filename.pdf | less' to view 
pdfs." I did a cartoon-style headshake and said "What? What! What!" out 
loud. Really. I had no idea!

Apparently lesspipe calls other programs to convert files to text 
(pdftotext in this case). It works very well.

That being said, I don't feel like invoking "lesspipe filename.pdf | 
less" every time I want to see a PDF, so I wrote a scripty little 
program to simplify invocation, and called it "pdf". Now I can type "pdf 
filename.pdf" and the file renders in "less."

Here's the program if you want to use it:


#include <stdlib.h> // system
#include <string.h> // strcat, strcpy

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {

char *systemcall;

    strcpy (systemcall, "lesspipe \"");
    strcat (systemcall, argv[1]);
    strcat (systemcall, "\" | less");
    system (systemcall);

    return 0;
}


Compilation: if you save the program as pdf.c, the command to create 
an executable is "gcc pdf.c -o pdf".

Move pdf to a directory in your path and you can invoke it from 
anywhere.

In case you want to read your PDFs on an old device (MS-DOS with EDIT 
perhaps?), you can convert them to text with the following command: 
"lesspipe filename.pdf > filename.txt". Of course, you can also do that 
with Calibre, but it's a lot less fun!