pdf to ti 89

[chaim.lerman]

does anyone know how to put a pdf file into my ti 89 titanium???
i have no idea how to do it and i really need it for a physics test.
i would appriciate if some one could tell me how to do it.

[FloppusMaximus]

As far as I know there aren't any real PDF viewers for the TI-89, so presumably you're looking to convert it into some more useful form :)

Because PDF files are fundamentally based on presentation rather than content, they're difficult to convert into any other format (except for other presentation formats such as PostScript.) If you want to convert a PDF into plain text, for instance, the obvious thing to do would be to extract all the text strings in the file and concatentate them. This doesn't work because the strings in the file aren't necessarily in the correct order. Furthermore, such a method wouldn't take the layout into account (the strings themselves don't contain line breaks, and depending on the program that generated the PDF file, they often don't contain spaces either.) There are various tools which try to convert PDF to other formats, generally using a lot of heuristics and resulting in a file that's readable but rather messy.

It's also worth noting that some PDF files have been deliberately obfuscated by scrambling the font characters (in fact, I think some of TI's documentation has been obfuscated this way.) And it's not uncommon to see PDF files that simply consist of a series of scanned images; in that case you need an OCR program to extract the text from the image.

With all that said, and keeping in mind that I don't have a TI-89 myself, I would use pdftotext (part of the xpdf package) to convert the PDF to plain text, and (perhaps after touching up the file by hand) convert that into a TICT-format eBook. If you need diagrams in addition to the text, I would probably take screenshots of the required diagrams and convert them by hand. (Does anybody know of a good compressed-image viewer for the 89? I don't.)