PDF - reflow text or export to HTML/txt?

[Havin_it]

Hello,

I have a Massive Programming Book(TM) that I'm reading, and I'd like to be able to read chunks of it on my mobile phone with Acrobat Reader LE. I already have a PDF version of the book, but at 20MB it's far too large to even open on the phone. I can break it into smaller chunks using CUPS-PDF, but even then I have a problem: the page is still too large to read left-to-right on the phone's weedy screen (even in landscape).

So I'm wondering, is there some way I can get the text into a format I can read within the shabby confines of my phone's screen? The text in the original PDF is "real" text (not just an image of text) so it can be read programmatically, but without basic formatting (bullets, headers etc.) it's pretty unreadable when pasted into a .txt file.

I know that Openoffice 3 will bring PDF editing potential, but I've not seen any information on using the betas of this with Gentoo so far (if you have any tips on this, I'm interested). The only other thing I found in portage was pdf2html, but that appears to be for creating graphical snapshots of each page, which doesn't solve my problem.

Is there anything available that could solve this conundrum? Any suggestions welcome!

[Enlight]

if you know a bit of perl using cam::pdf should be straight forward, It will allow you to copy some pages to another pdf and tons of other stuff.

using pdf::api2 is way more tricky and only needed if you want to mess with pdf internals.

[Havin_it]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

Sadly I know nothing of Perl, and I don't think I can justify trying to learn enough to do something with this module (right terminology?) to meet my needs. It looks tempting but I'm concentrating on learning Java right now (that's what the book is for!) and keeping up with my PHP.

Hmmm... wonder if there's anything similar out there for PHP? Will go and have a look...