pdftotext

pdftotext − Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 0.91)

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

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.

−f number

Specifies the first page to convert.

−l number

Specifies the last page to convert.

−ascii7

Convert the text to 7-bit ASCII; the default is to use the 8-bit ISO Latin-1 character set.

−latin2

Convert the text to the Latin-2 (ISO-8859-2) character set. (This will only be useful if the font encodings are specified correctly in the PDF file.)

−latin5

Convert the text to the Latin-5 (ISO-8859-9) character set. (This will only be useful if the font encodings are specified correctly in the PDF file.)

−eucjp

Convert Japanese text to EUC-JP. This is currently the only option for converting Japanese text -- the only effect is to switch to 7-bit ASCII for non-Japanese text, in order to fit into the EUC-JP encoding. (This option is only available if pdftotext was compiled with Japanese support.)

−raw

Keep the text in content stream order. This is a hack which often "undoes" column formatting, etc. This option will likely be replaced with something more sophisticated when pdftotext is rewritten to use a smarter text placement algorithm.

−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 is equivalent.)

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.

The pdftotext software and documentation are copyright 1996-2000 Derek B. Noonburg (derekn@foolabs.com).

xpdf(1), pdftops(1), pdfinfo(1), pdftopbm(1), pdfimages(1)
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/