Xpdf Thai Support

Contents

1. What Xpdf is
2. Thai Support for Xpdf
3. Download
4. References

Xpdf : A PDF Viewer for X, with some additional conversion utilities.

I've added the extraction of PDF ToUnicode map so that Thai glyph codes in PDF documents which embed and subset TrueType or Type0 fonts can be mapped into character codes. The glyph variations that are used for elegant typesetting are also substituted back to the original character codes. And, finally, the -thai option for pdftotext which indicates TIS-620 output character set is also added.

To get the Thai support for Xpdf's pdftotext, please follow these steps:

1. Download original xpdf-0.92 source from the Xpdf Project. You may also need t1lib and freetype to get supports for Type 1 and TrueType fonts.
2. Get the Thai patch for Xpdf
3. Explode the source and apply the patch:
   • gzip -cd xpdf-0.92.tgz | tar xf -
   • patch -p0 < xpdf-0.92-thai.patch
4. Regenerate the configure script:
   • cd xpdf-0.92
   • autoconf
   If it complains something, you need to rerun aclocal:
   • cp aclocal.m4 acinclude.m4
   • aclocal
   • autoconf
5. As a practice recommended by GNU gurus, create a separate build directory. Then, configure it with --enable-thai option:
   • mkdir bld
   • cd bld
   • ../configure --enable-thai
6. Compile the programs:
   • make
7. As root, install the programs:
   • make install
8. To extract a PDF document with Thai texts, use pdftotext with -thai option:
   • pdftotext -thai my.pdf

Patches for Xpdf

• Xpdf 0.92 patch to add ToUnicode map extraction and Thai output for pdftotext.

1. Adobe, PDF Reference Version 1.3, 2nd Ed.
2. Adobe, ToUnicode Mapping File Tutorial
3. Adobe, Distiller Font Management
4. Derek B. Noonburg, Xpdf Project

Theppitak Karoonboonyanan Created: 2001-09-06 Last Updated 2001-09-06

Copyright © 2001 by Theppitak Karoonboonyanan. All right reserved.