For fedora, now actually the tiny evince has been good enough to replace the bulky acrobat reader.
Check the size: evince < 1 M while acrobat reader 7.0 > 100 M. And for chinese pdf file, you don’t need to install additional chinese font for evince as we did for acrobat reader.
After you use “rpm -e ***” to remove the bulky one, file association is still there. The first choice when you click on the pdf file is still to look for acroread. The way is simple: sudo ln -s /usr/bin/evince /usr/bin/acroread . However, this would again mislead firefox to look for acrobat reader to open the online pdf file, probably a bug.
For firefox, there is no above mentioned problem thanks to mozplugger. Now everything is fine and the system just loses the weight.
For windows user, foxit is pretty much of acrobat reader but much much compact.
From http://www.softwaretipspalace.com/linux/tips-tricks/convert_pdf_file_into_text_inside_linux.html
A PDF file can be converted into text by the Tool belonging to the XPDF package pdftotext:
pdftotext irgendein.pdf
This instruction produces a text file with the name irgendein.txt with contents of any PDF. They can work on this file now completely normally. The parameter – layout ensures for the fact that the appearance of the PDF file is transferred as far as possible to the text file:
pdftotext -layout irgendein.pdf
If you want to transfer only certain sides from a PDF file to the text excerpt, goes with the parameter – f (for first PAGE) and – l (for last PAGE):
pdftotext -f 3 -l 7 irgendein.pdf
in this example only the pages from 3 to 7 after irgendein.txt would be taken over.
For converting text to pdf, there is several ways:
1. by openoffice
2. by google document online from gmail
3. by a2ps and then ps2pdf in linux