With bmv ...

When I first started this series of posts on command line access to pdf files I had a different computer, one that was pretty compatible with SVGALib tools. The newer computer seems to work with SVGALib with extreme unpredictability. There seems to be decision 'out there' to not bother with keeping SVGALib current, to try and shift things towards use of frame buffers, which seem to work fine on the new PC> A while back I became aware of a frame buffer based tool for viewing postscript files called bmv. To take advantage of in pdfmenu, I added some lines:

alias PDFTOPS='/usr/bin/pdftops  '  ;
alias BMV='/usr/bin/bmv -m1 -v13 '  ;
    #       the -m/-v values were tuned by tests to what seemed
    #       to work best on my computer for typical .pdf files.
..........
 10 )
    THEPSFILE="${INSIDEFILE#/tmp/}"  ;
    THEPSFILE="/tmp/${THEPSFILE%.pdf}.ps"  ;
    RM  ${THEPSFILE}  ;
    PDFTOPS  ${INSIDEFILE}   ${THEPSFILE}  ;
    BMV      ${THEPSFILE}  ;
    RM ${THEPSFILE}  ;
    ;;
  

and appropriate entries to the select menu. bmv is fairly easy to figure out how to navigate. In general, I'm satisfied with it's job of showing .pdf files.