Adobe Reader Setup Problems and Text Copying

[grdSavant]

There are some great, invaluable Greek tutorials and notes for me out on the web, e.g., http://www.stoa.org/~mahoney/teaching/greek100.pdf, "100 Essential Greek Words," by Anne Mahoney, and others documents which can be of huge benefit to those of us who are beginning Greek study. (Personally, I'm going to do those 100 immediately before I continue through my texts. She has a list of 1000, too.)

But a few of the .pdf documents use fonts (typeface, more properly) which are difficult to see on some computer screens because of either character weight or bit-density so that they appear gray, or the diacritical marks are too smudged or otherwise blurred making it hard to discern their significance.

So I thought I would simply copy and paste the contents of the difficult .pdf's into some other convenient file type and change the font to something I can read.

But that doesn't work if my computer doesn't have the same font in which the .pdf is presented (is that true?). If a .pdf has used something like New Athena Unicode I can copy and paste okay. On the other hand, if the .pdf is in CenturySchL or some custom font all I get is improperly converted transliterated code, which seems to be unusable for anything.

One solution to this problem for me was to re-type the whole thing. Argh! but I did that.

I suppose I could purchase the font, but gadzooks! where does that stop?

And then again--maybe one of you know another way to do this? eh?

tia, jerry

[annis]

I suppose I could purchase the font, but gadzooks! where does that stop?

And then again--maybe one of you know another way to do this? eh?

Sometimes. You might find Transcoder (a java program, see the bottom of this page) useful for some of this.

Until recently each Greek font tended to have similar but still distinct ways to encode Greek. Perseus could be asked to spit out Greek in more than a half-dozen formats. Unicode has tamed this encoding mess somewhat, but even now it hasn't completely taken over.

In the case of Anne Mahoney's documents, I recognize the look — she used LaTeX, probably using the Ibycus4 encoding, which no public tools except LaTeX and maybe Diogenes will cope with. Some of my older documents at Aoidoi will use the same thing, I'm afraid, though I took pains to avoid the fuzziness effect some of Mahoney's docs display (strangely, you'll find they print just fine).

[grdSavant]

You might find Transcoder (a java program, see the bottom of this page) useful for some of this.

Thanks for the help and the link. The transcoder helps, almost. It stumbles for me on almost any diacritical, Mahoney or anything else that is not unicode based, but it does transcode what Adobe gives me in what looks like GreekKeys form. If I were ever to transcribe something again it would be about 70% easier.

I did get the CenturySchL font for free (non-commercial use only) somewhere out there in the ether, but that still leaves the custom fonts which may never be located. If I work through it all a bit more methodically one day there may yet be a complete solution. It may be hiding there in the LaTeX stuff. Diogenes is sweet. Little bit here, little bit there, and before you know it you have a mess.

I do believe Adobe Reader would print fine, if I only had an ink cartridge.

[jk0592]

One easy solution which works on the MacIntosh, is to use Preview to cut the pdf text, and paste it in Pages. There you can easily enlarge the pdf selection to make it more readable. For some reason, Apple supports pdf manipulation extremely well in its applications.

[grdSavant]

To put the finishing touches on this,

In the case of Anne Mahoney's documents, I recognize the look — she used LaTeX, probably using the Ibycus4 encoding, which no public tools except LaTeX and maybe Diogenes will cope with. Some of my older documents at Aoidoi will use the same thing, I'm afraid, though I took pains to avoid the fuzziness effect some of Mahoney's docs display (strangely, you'll find they print just fine).

Yes, the Mahoney docs indeed were created with pdfTeX. I have gone through what seems like all the permutations of TeX (and variants), and Adobe Acrobat. More than two days down the drain, but at least I have seen most of TeX and Acrobat, now. It does boil down to a missing F26 font, which is probably from some commercial font pack, since it does not seem to be part of any commonly available TeX library. The other fonts I was eventually able to locate and install.

One TeX variant, MikTeX, is one of the most sophisticated and well organized applications I've seen anywhere. Too bad it isn't really needed anymore (i.e., in the 21st century) for document layout and publication.

Thanks for the pointers to TeX.

One easy solution which works on the MacIntosh, is to use Preview to cut the pdf text, and paste it in Pages. There you can easily enlarge the pdf selection to make it more readable. For some reason, Apple supports pdf manipulation extremely well in its applications.

In the depths of envy, I even priced various Apple Mac configurations, but they simply cost too much (since I build my own systems, I'm in a habitat of an entirely different universe). Except, now that I read for the 10th time what you wrote, yes I could read it in Adobe Reader if I zoomed in quite a bit. Which, silly me, seemed like an awkward solution.