The one thread you mention pertains to Windows, but X11::GUITest could be useful.

However I am having problems using it - could you perhaps help me out?

My problem is that it is easy to start an application and send it keystrokes but I cannot figure out how to e.g. drive the file-selection dialog of Acrobat Reader. All I can see are methods that send mouse-click events at specific coordinates which is not that useful because a) how do you figure out where to click and b) even if you could it would make some very brittle code that breaks as soon as a windows moves.

The python-app I mentioned above does it a bit better because it hooks into the Accessability layer of GNOME to retrieve metadata about the dialog in question and allows you to refer to the widgets logically rather than by position.

Does something like that exist for Perl or can anyone show me how to use X11::GUITest properly?

Many thanks

Sorry no idea how to analyze GTK, no practical experience.

Specifying the window geometry should always control the position of the dialogs and if you need more security you can always clip from a snapshot and compare the images.

But I doubt that automating acroread is always the best way to manipulate PDFs, if this is your intention...

Cheers Rolf

My problem is a generic one - the use of Acrobat is just an example.

But as an aside: Is there any other way to extract the text from a pdf apart from using Acrobats "save as text" feature?