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Name

pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.03)

Synopsis

pdftotext [options] [PDF-file [text-file]]

Description

Pdftotext converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text.

Pdftotext reads the PDF file, PDF-file, and writes a text file, text-file. If text-file is not specified, pdftotext converts file.pdf to file.txt. If text-file is ’-’, the text is sent to stdout.

Options

-f number
Specifies the first page to convert.
-l number
Specifies the last page to convert.
-r number
Specifies the resolution, in DPI. The default is 72 DPI.
-x number
Specifies the x-coordinate of the crop area top left corner
-y number
Specifies the y-coordinate of the crop area top left corner
-W number
Specifies the width of crop area in pixels (default is 0)
-H number
Specifies the height of crop area in pixels (default is 0)
-layout
Maintain (as best as possible) the original physical layout of the text. The default is to ’undo’ physical layout (columns, hyphenation, etc.) and output the text in reading order.
-fixed number
Assume fixed-pitch (or tabular) text, with the specified character width (in points). This forces physical layout mode.
-raw
Keep the text in content stream order. This is a hack which often "undoes" column formatting, etc. Use of raw mode is no longer recommended.
-htmlmeta
Generate a simple HTML file, including the meta information. This simply wraps the text in <pre> and </pre> and prepends the meta headers.
-bbox
Generate an XHTML file containing bounding box information for each word in the file.
-enc encoding-name
Sets the encoding to use for text output. This defaults to "UTF-8".
-listenc
Lits the available encodings
-eol unix | dos | mac
Sets the end-of-line convention to use for text output.
-nopgbrk
Don’t insert page breaks (form feed characters) between pages.
-opw password
Specify the owner password for the PDF file. Providing this will bypass all security restrictions.
-upw password
Specify the user password for the PDF file.
-q
Don’t print any messages or errors.
-v
Print copyright and version information.
-h
Print usage information. (-help and --help are equivalent.)

Bugs

Some PDF files contain fonts whose encodings have been mangled beyond recognition. There is no way (short of OCR) to extract text from these files.

Exit Codes

The Xpdf tools use the following exit codes:
  1. No error.
  2. Error opening a PDF file.
  3. Error opening an output file.
  4. Error related to PDF permissions.
  5. Other error.

Author

The pdftotext software and documentation are copyright 1996-2011 Glyph & Cog, LLC.

See Also

pdfdetach(1) , pdffonts(1) , pdfimages(1) , pdfinfo(1) , pdftocairo(1) , pdftohtml(1) , pdftoppm(1) , pdftops(1)

Table of Contents