A. On Thu, 2018-07-12 at 14:57 +0100, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 12/07/18 10:21, Bev Nicolson wrote:
On 11/07/18 22:50, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 11/07/18 10:41, Bev Nicolson wrote:
I don't have Flash installed so I'm not able to 'measure' Adobe documents and it turns out this could be useful in some circumstances. Does anyone know of a Linux tool one could uses for this?
What do you mean by "measure" a pdf document? I don't understand. I could be being thick!
Steve
Say you have a scale drawing of a ramp. Adobe's measuring tool allows you to find out what the actual, physical length of that ramp will be.
Phil suggested (off list, I think) PDF Studio Viewer but I'm not sure it works in the way I was hoping. There's not much choice, to be honest. (As far as I can tell.)
Ah, I was unaware you could do that. Open Office Draw has rulers, so you might be able to work it out. Inscape has a measurement tool. Not entirely sure if it would help. Click on the start point and drag to the end & it shows you dimensions of points it crosses in pixels. I don't know if that helps. It also imports the PDF so I guess its size may change.
Good luck. Steve
i've been watching this thread to see if something interesting would come up. So far, nothing special (and no assurance that the suggestions made would work).
So, Bev, here is the approach I would use (since deacdes ago) for this kind of task. This is very "bare hands" and could involve writing on paper ...
Bex: You say "Say you have a scale drawing of a ramp". Not sure what this kmeans. [A]Is there a scale indicator (e.g. a line with spaced tics, representing the scale relative to reality)? Or [B]is it independently stated that, if printed, the PDF as printed would be in a certain scale relationship to reality?
In case [A], it would suffice to measure the PDF size of the object and the PDF distance betweem tic-marks. In case [B], it would be necessary to somehow relate the PDF to the printed size.
Either way, I would convert the PDF to PS Set Acrobat Reader (or whatever) to print to a PS file Page Scaling: None Print to File xxxx.ps
Then open the PS file using 'gv': gv xxxx.ps
On top is a series of buttons, one of which is raw display scale (default 1,000m but offering seceral from 0.100 uo to 10.000), Now it is a matter of countibg pixels (left-righ, bottom-top). The pixel coordinates for where the cursoe currntly is are displayed on a little box (2nd down) on the left). Positioning the cursor more precisely relative to pixel resolution if helped by using lerger display scaling.
As you move, the cursor around, the displayed coordinates vary. You cn now mesure the vertical difference between two points, and the horizontal difference, in pixels. This can then be used to obtain the length of the straight line joining them: lrngth = square-root(horizontal-squared + vertical-squared)/
It renains to convert this into "real" measurements, In case [A], you can also measure the pixel-distance beteen the tic-marks. Then you can convert the lengths into real distances.
in case [B]. you need to know the r4latioonship between pixel length and printed length.
This is not readily available, since PS (and PDF) are not "pixel-based" -- that is left to whatever is used to print or display them. I'm not sure how to approach this; perhaps by aimply printing out the page and measuring thibgs on it, then relating these measurements to the pixel counts. But, by the time you've printed and measured it, in case [B] you're already there1
Hoping this helps. Don't get too pixilated, Bev![**] Best wishes, Ted. [**] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pixilated