latex-pax in Windows and Linux

Created: November 12, 2024 Last Modified: November 12, 2024 Category: windows, linux Print this page Back to Home

Summary

This post contains information about using latex-pax (see also this page) in Windows and Arch Linux.

In Windows

I installed a full version of TeXLive 2024 from an ISO image. This already contains latex-pax.
Download PDFBox 0.7.3 and extract the downloaded ZIP file to C:\.

Create a pax.bat file with the following content.

@echo off
SETLOCAL
  
set CLASSPATH=C:\PDFBox-0.7.3\lib\PDFBox-0.7.3.jar;%CLASSPATH%
perl "C:\texlive\2024\texmf-dist\scripts\pax\pdfannotextractor.pl" %*

Run pax.bat <filename>.pdf to generate a <filename>.pax file that contains the PDF informations of <filename>.pdf.

In Arch Linux

Again, latex-pax is already installed.
Install pdfbox by running yay -S pdfbox. You can also download PDFBox 0.7.3 and extract the downloaded ZIP file to /usr/share/java

Create a /usr/bin/pax file with the following content.

#!/bin/sh
  
PAX_JAR=/usr/share/texmf-dist/scripts/pax/pax.jar
# PDFBOX_JAR=/usr/share/java/PDFBox-0.7.3/lib/PDFBox-0.7.3.jar
PDFBOX_JAR=/usr/share/pdfbox/pdfbox.jar
  
java -cp $PAX_JAR:$PDFBOX_JAR pax.PDFAnnotExtractor "$@"

Also run chmod a+x /usr/bin/pax as root user to allow everyone to run the command pax.

Run pax <filename>.pdf to generate a <filename>.pax file that contains the PDF annotations of <filename>.pdf.