1. Download the software and fonts
You may have already downloaded the
Xpdf tools while watching one of my earlier videos in the series, but there has since been an upgrade from Version 3 to Version 4 and there is a new download site:
https://www.xpdfreader.com/download.html
Visit that site and download the pre-compiled Windows binary ZIP archive, then unzip it.
Download the Symbol and Zapf Dingbats fonts from the same page.
2. Locate the documentation folder for the Xpdf utilities
Go to the folder where you unzipped the downloaded ZIP file and find the
doc folder.
3. Read the documentation for the configuration file - xpdfrc
Go into the
doc folder and find the plain text file called
xpdfrc.txt.
Open it with any text editor, such as Notepad, and read it. This is the documentation for the configuration file.
4. Review the sample configuration file
Go into the
doc folder and find the plain text file called
sample-xpdfrc.
Open it with any text editor, such as Notepad, and review it. This is a sample configuration file.
5. Set up a test folder
Create a test folder.
Copy these files into your test folder:
pdftoppm.exe
pdftops.exe
d050000l.pfb
s050000l.pfb
Copy a sample PDF file into your test folder.
6. Create the xpdfrc file
Using any text editor, such as Notepad, create a plain text file in your test folder and name it
xpdfrc (without the
.txt file extension) and put these two lines in it:
fontFile Symbol "s050000l.pfb"
fontFile ZapfDingbats "d050000l.pfb"
7. Run the PDFtoPPM and PDFtoPS utilities
Run the same commands as shown in my PDFtoPPM and PDFtoPS videos, which produced these font errors:
Config Error: No display font for 'Symbol'
Config Error: No display font for 'ZapfDingbats'
Confirm that the errors no longer occur — due to the fixes in the
xpdfrc file.
8. Experiment with other features in the configuration file
That completes your first test of the
xpdfrc configuration file. I encourage you to experiment with its many capabilities.
If you find this video to be helpful, please click the
thumbs-up icon below.
Thank you for completing my Experts Exchange video Micro Tutorial series on the Xpdf utilities. I hope you've enjoyed watching it as much as I've enjoyed creating it. Regards, Joe