CLI pdf viewer for linux

Hi I think that you don't need to write a program for your purpose I mean reading pdf file in console mode because less command already do it for you. So use it and just enjoy it.

less "the name of pdf file"

There is also the green PDF viewer. There is a demo on YouTube.

Ok, you asked to know even "crappy" ones. Here are two (decide yourself about their respective crappiness):

First: Ghostscript's txtwrite output device

 gs \
   -dBATCH \
   -dNOPAUSE \
   -sDEVICE=txtwrite \
   -sOutputFile=- \
   /path/to/your/pdf

Second: XPDF's pdftotext CLI utility (better than Ghostscript):

 pdftotext \
   -f 13 \
   -l 17 \
   -layout \
   -opw supersecret \
   -upw secret \
   -eol unix \
   -nopgbrk \
   /path/to/your/pdf
   - |less

This will display the page range 13 (first page) to 17 (last page), preserve the layout of a double-password protected named PDF file (using user and owner passwords secret and supersecret), with Unix EOL convention, but without inserting pagebreaks between PDF pages, piped through less...

pdftotext -h displays all available commandline options.

Of course, both tools only work for the text parts of PDFs (if they have any). Oh, and mathematical formula also won't work too well... ;-)

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Edit: I had mis-typed the command above (originally using pdftops instead of pdftotext).