Python, Perl & PDF files

[rbt]

davidb at mcs.st-and.ac.uk wrote:
> Robin Becker wrote:
> 
>>rbt wrote:
>>......
>>
>>>I just want to read PDF files in a portable way (windows, linux,
> 
> mac)
> 
>>>from within Python.
>>>
>>
>>......
>>
>>I suppose you mean extract PDF pages and do something with them.
>>http://www.reportlab.com does have a tool that handles that in
>>Python.
>>It's not free though.
> 
> 
> I imagine that you pay for a reasonable level of support.
> 
> 
>>There are indeed a number of perl modules which do that and other
>>modules which allow you to overprint etc etc.
>>
>>You can always hand translate one of the extract perl modules. They
>>don't seem that hard. Alternatively put a good case to
>>andy at reportlab.com.
> 
> 
> Before embarking on that route, it might be worth looking at this page:
> 
>   http://phaseit.net/claird/comp.text.pdf/PDF_converters.html
> 
> There's a link to a (surprisingly recent) snapshot of my own package,
> that can be used to read some PDF files, and another highly
> recommended module. In the interests of balance, if not completeness,
> I should also mention PDF Playground which has better support for
> reading and writing PDF files:
> 
>   http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfplayground/
> 
> Maybe this should also be listed on the above resources page. Cameron?
> Are you reading this? ;-)
> 
> David
> 

Thanks David. I'll see what these tools can do for me. Wouldn't you 
agree that it would be in Python's interest to have a standard way in 
which it handles (reads, writes, etc) PDF files on multiple platforms? 
It'd would *really* help me... I hate using Barbaric Perl scripts just 
to deal with PDF files, but if I must, I must.