On Fri, 2007-08-03 at 13:13 -0700, der.hans wrote:
> I wanted to look at the binary content for a pdf, so I lessed it. I got
> the text of the pdf. Hmm, type $file.pdf claimed it's pdf.
> 
> cat $file.pdf | less showed it to be pdf.
> 
> Apparently less can now produce the text from pdf files :).
> 
> I verified this works on Ubuntu 6.06 ( others verified more recent
> releases ) and debian stable.

For working with PDFs I find pdftk invaluable.  If you want to make the
binary more PostScript like you can do:

pdftk myfile.pdf output - uncompress

And get something that can make some sense.  You can also fill out
forms, split PDFs and put PDFs together with it.  Very cool.

		--Ted