2) As text

One approach to viewing .pdf files is presented in the O'Reilly book http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009113/index.html|"Linux_Desktop_Hacks". In the first edition, Hack #53, p. 170, "Display PDF Documents in a Terminal", gives a script that uses pdftohtml and elinks to view the text in pdf documents. Below is my variation on their viewpdf, I call it pdfview.

---

#!/bin/bash  -


#  per ORA  Linux Desktop Hacks  #53
#  with the following line added to '/etc/mailcap':
#  application/pdf; /usr/local/bin/pdfview '%s'; needsterminal; description=Portable Document Format; nametemplate=%s.pdf
# $Id: pdfview,v 1.5 2008/07/14 02:19:18 root Exp root $


#  pdftohtml -q -noframes -stdout ${1} | elinks -force-html
# does not work: pdftohtml -q -stdout ${1} | elinks -force-html

ABSOLUTE=${1:0:1}  ;

case ${ABSOLUTE} in
/ )
  PREFIX=''  ;
  ;;
* )
  PREFIX="${PWD}/"  ;
  ;;
esac

WORKFILE="$(mktemp -p /tmp XXXXXXXX).html"  ;
while [ -a ${WORKFILE} ]
do
  WORKFILE="$(mktemp -p /tmp XXXXXXXX).html"  ;
done

#     -- apparently pdftohtml requires the file end in '.html'

SOURCEFILE="${PREFIX}${1}"  ;

cd /tmp

pdftohtml  -q -nodrm  "${SOURCEFILE}"   ${WORKFILE##*/}  ;

exec elinks -force-html   ${WORKFILE}  ;