searchable pdf files

[Cristian Tibirna]

On 22 March 2006 07:08, Johannes Maier wrote:
> Hi at all,
>
> I'm wondering how to produce searchable pdf files with kprinter. The
> printing of pdf files genrally works fine, but they all seem to consist of
> pictures. So it isn't possible to search for information inside the pdf
> files for example with acroread. How can I change this?

kprinter takes data from an application (most frequently in PostScript format) 
and uses ghostscript to generate pdfs (converting, most frequently, ps to 
pdf).

It is my understanding that in order to generate 
searchable/indexed/hyperlinked pdfs, one needs a direct pdf generator, that 
has to have knowledge of the raw data (as it is before the printing into 
postscript). This "generator" would obviously be the initial printing 
application. With Qt4/KDE4 this will possibly become more and more the case. 
Yet even then, I doubt KDEPrint/kprinter will be able to do anything in 
particular about this. It will remain the responsibility of the applications 
that require printing.

If you want to investigate further, you will have to look at ghostscript's 
capabilities and documentation.

If you find a method (using something else than ghostscript) to generate such 
pdfs, it is very easy to configure kprinter to use that particular method 
instead of the current one (one line in a user-configurable file).

Thank you.

-- 
Cristian Tibirna
KDE developer .. tibirna at kde.org .. http://www.kde.org