Somebody - author in a prestigious scientific journal - seems to have
thought the ideal format to save a video in was using Microsoft Word to
envelop it into a PDF. Although that PDF declares itself as version 1.7
it can't be opened with Acrobat 8. How do I extract the video from that
silly mantle? As far as I'm aware (which is limited) it can be done
neither through the xpdf-tool nor ghostscript.

Any hints?
Danke
	Axel

Axel Berger wrote:

> Somebody - author in a prestigious scientific journal - seems to have
> thought the ideal format to save a video in was using Microsoft Word to
> envelop it into a PDF. Although that PDF declares itself as version 1.7
> it can't be opened with Acrobat 8. How do I extract the video from that
> silly mantle? As far as I'm aware (which is limited) it can be done
> neither through the xpdf-tool nor ghostscript.

You've tried it with poppler: 
http://rpm.netlabs.org/release/00/zip/poppler-0_35_0-1_oc00.zip ?

Poppler is a fork of xpdf. Perhaps pdfdetach -saveall file does what you 
want.

-- 
J�rg Rustmeier

J�rg Rustmeier wrote:

> You've tried it with poppler:
> http://rpm.netlabs.org/release/00/zip/poppler-0_35_0-1_oc00.zip ?

Sorry, I forgot: It's only an OS/2-eCS file. Eventually look for the 
Linux version or a Windows port.
-- 
J�rg Rustmeier

> How do I extract the video from that silly mantle? As far as I'm
> aware (which is limited) it can be done neither through the
> xpdf-tool nor ghostscript.

The "pdftk" CLI utility has an /unpack/ command.

BTW, is it passworded?  If not, then indeed it's silly to contain a
video in a PDF document by itself.  OTOH, if it needs to be encrypted
for a non-technical audience in a platform agnostic way that does not
impose installation of an obscure tool, then it's sensible.  What
alternative is there?  There's zip, but corporate e-mail firewalls
often block zip files.

Nomen Nescio wrote:
> OTOH, if it needs to be encrypted
> for a non-technical audience in a platform agnostic way that does
> not impose installation of an obscure tool, then it's sensible. =

> What alternative is there?

Videos as supplementary material are not uncommon in scientific
joiurnals and I've seen them all, mov, mp4, even avi, but never before
PDF. And even if there were a reason for it, who but a moron would
choose Microsoft Word as the appropriate tool to do it with?

And thanks J=F6rg and Nomen, I'll look into both your suggestions.

Axel