View pdf file in terminal

Question

I want to see pdf files available on our cluster rather than copying them into my local machine and than visualize. Please tell me how can i do this.

Answer 1

In many systems less uses lesspipe, which can handle pdftotext automatically. Therefore, you can immediately try

 less file.pdf

which will show the output of pdftotext in less.

Answer 2

I guess, it is not possible to see PDF file in terminal but you can check it's content by converting PDF file to text. You can do this as:

pdftotext a.pdf

It will produce a.txt file which you can read into VIM.

For ubuntu-variant, this binary is available in following package.

poppler-utils

Answer 3

Thanks for the answer mentioning lesspipe; when I want to "view a pdf file in terminal", that for me means that I want to actually see an uncompressed PDF, obtained via, say:

pdftk in.pdf output out.pdf uncompress

... and then, I always wondered why both less in.pdf and less out.pdf give me just text strings in the PDF (and excluding the text-only PDF commands I'd expect in out.pdf).

Well, that happens because of the lesspipe assuming I want pdftotext being run first - and since here I don't, I have to specifically disable the lesspipe by setting LESSOPEN environment variable to nothing; that is:

$ LESSOPEN="" less out.pdf

And finally, I can view the uncompressed PDF code using less :)

Cheers!

Answer 4

One more solution is to use command gnome-open

gnome-open youfile.pdf

Provided that you have login your server with -X option (ssh -X)