[THE 1st TIME] Text conversion in a terminal

[machinebacon]

You are stuck in tty and want to read PDFs, edit .doc files or check the content of an .xls file? You can!

PDF
You only need the pdftotext program, get it with

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sudo apt-get install poppler-utils

and then you can already start:

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lesspipe The_Book.pdf

You can convert it to a txt file:

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lesspipe The_Book.pdf > The_Book.txt

which creates the same output file like the short version:

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pdftotext The_Book.pdf

.gz
And lesspipe can also help you read the damned .gz files in /usr/share/doc/, like:

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lesspipe /usr/share/doc/mc/HACKING.gz

.doc
Here you have the choice: catdoc and antiword do the conversion from .doc to ASCII quite perfectly. You can even create a LaTeX file.

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catdoc -a Worksheet.doc #create an ASCII file
catdoc -l Worksheet.doc #create a LaTeX
antiword Worksheet.doc | less # create an ASCII and send it to less

.xls
Again, catdoc can do the conversion, this time to csv:

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xls2csv Spreadsheet1.xls