[tex-live] apparent bug in detex

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 3 November 2010 cfrees at imapmail.org wrote:

 > On Tue 2nd Nov, 2010 at 20:24, Victor Ivrii seems to have written:
 > 
 > > On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 8:04 PM,  <cfrees at imapmail.org> wrote:
 > >> On Mon 1st Nov, 2010 at 22:16, Karl Berry seems to have written:
 > >>
 > >>>   pdftotext is already part of TeX Live.
 > >>>
 > >>> For Windows only.   (As with many other generic tools.)
 > >>
 > >> I do have pdftotext (though not from TeX Live, obviously) but whenever
 > >> I've tried to use it it has taken simply forever to produce any output
 > >> even for quite small documents. I would not like to try this method on
 > >> a paper of even 3,000 words - never mind 8,000 or more.
 > >>
 > >> - cfr
 > >>
 > >>>   BTW, pdftotext -layout yields amazingly good results.
 > >>>
 > >>> Yes :).
 > >>>
 > >>
 > >
 > >
 > > On my intel macs (including 4 y.o. underpowered MacBookPro) works
 > > almost momentarily
 > 
 > This would likely still be faster than a G4 (should be, anyway) but
 > when I say "slow" I mean really, really slow -
 > go off for coffee, get distracted and watch a movie, make dinner and
 > finally remember you left the computer doing something and pdftotext
 > likely still hasn't finished. Usually, I just lost patience and aborted
 > it. I think it did sometimes finish and seemed to extract the text OK
 > but it would usually be quicker to open the file and type out the words
 > into an editor, to be honest. And I never tried running it on an even
 > small-medium sized pdf. Maybe a few paragraphs at most.

Are the programs pdffonts and pdfinfo also slow?

Regards,
  Reinhard

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