[kjs3]

In a societal collapse, the only thing that you list that I think would be worth the effort would be "solar powered cb ham radios for communications."

Considering how much potentially invaluable info is only/mostly/only easily available as a PDF, I'm thinking a working ereader would be of nontrivial value.

Now...if there was only a way to crunch a PDF on an 8-bit processor I recovered from my washing machine...

[anthk]

- pdftotext from poppler-tools under Linux/BSD

- wv/odt2txt and friends

- cp/m can read TXT files generated from gnuplot

- A Forth with Starting Forth it's hugely valuable, ditto with a Math Book like the Calculus from Spivak.

Not a collapse, but a network attach on infra makes most modern OSes unusable, they need to be constantly updated. If you can salvage some older machine with DuskOS+networking, simple gopher and IRC clients/servers will work with really low bandwidth (2/3 KBPS and less).

[kjs3]

- pdftotext from poppler-tools under Linux/BSD

Based on xpdf. Probably not 8-bit capable.

- pdftotext from poppler-tools under Linux/BSD

From OpenOffice. Probably not 8-bit capable.

Point to a PDF to something useful converter that runs in 64K bytes and can handle the 'PDF as a wrapper around some non-text image of the document' and we can talk. Seriously...I'd be fascinated.

- cp/m can read TXT files generated from gnuplot

Not sure how that helps. And can you port gnuplot to run in 8-bit/64k?

* a network attach on infra makes most modern OSes unusable, *

Ridiculous, unless your definition of 'usable' is 'unless I can get to TwitFaceTubeIn and watch cat videos ima gonna die!'. If civilization collapses and the network goes away tomorrow, my Debian 12, FreeBSD 14 and NetBSD 10 machines will work exactly as well as it does today until I can't power it and/or the hardware dies (sans email and web, of course). Yeah, the windows 10/11 things will bitch and moan constantly, and I assume MacOS too, but even with degraded functionality, it's far from 'unusable'. And I'll be able to load Linux or BSD on them so no worries.

they need to be constantly updated

No, they don't. Updates come in 2 broad categories: security fixes and feature release. Post-collapse and no network makes security much less urgent, and no new features is the new normal...get used to it. I have gear that runs HP/UX 10 (last support in 2003); still runs fine and delivering significant value.

And that ignores DOS, Win3, XP and such, which are still (disturbingly) common.

will work with really low bandwidth

You mean....with a network?

[anthk]

I meant, well, not 8 bit capable, but you can send the generated text files to them.

On 'gnuplot' for cp/m... doing a simple chart from X and Y values in TSV paired in two colums can be done either from forth or pascal or whatever you have to read two arrays.

I'm not stating a solution to read future PDF files. Forget the future ones; what I mean it's to 'convert' the ones we currently have.

I'm at a Spanish pubnix/tilde, a public unix server. Here I have a script which converts -with the help of a Cron job and sfeed-, RSS feeds into plain text to be readable over gopher. These can be read even from the crustiest DOS machines in Latin America and Windows 95/98/XP machines. I even pointed a working Retrozilla release, and it's spreading out quickly.

They are at least able to read news too with a gopher/gemini client and News Waffle, with a client written in TCL/TK saving tons of bandwidth. The port with IronTCL will work in the spot on XP machines. Download, decompress, run 'launch.bat' (lanzar.bar in Spanish). The ZIP file weights 15MB. No SSE2 it's required. Neither tons of RAM.

Compare that to a Chrome install. And Chrome requeriments.

The 2nd/3rd world might not be under an apocalipse, but they don't have the reliability of the first world. And lots of folks adored the News Waffle service saving a 95% of the bandwidth.

Instead of the apocalipse, think about 3rd world guys or the rural America. Somethink like https://lite.cnn.com and https://neuters.de will work even under natural disasters with really reduced bandwidth data. Or https://telae.net for Google Maps searchs.

gopher://magical.fish has news feeds, an English to French/Spanish and so on translator , good links to blogs, games and even TPB search. These can be run on any machine, or Lagrange under Android. And, yes, it might work better under a potential earthquake/flood than the web.

[kjs3]

I was opining about reading or converting PDFs on an 8-bit processor. And you're...I dunno what this is but it's certainly not a response to anything I said.