pdftotext - Man Page

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

Examples (TL;DR)

Convert filename.pdf to plain text and print it to stdout: pdftotext filename.pdf -
Convert filename.pdf to plain text and save it as filename.txt: pdftotext filename.pdf
Convert filename.pdf to plain text and preserve the layout: pdftotext -layout filename.pdf
Convert input.pdf to plain text and save it as output.txt: pdftotext input.pdf output.txt
Convert pages 2, 3 and 4 of input.pdf to plain text and save them as output.txt: pdftotext -f 2 -l 4 input.pdf output.txt

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. If PDF-file is ´-', it reads the PDF file from stdin.

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.
-nodiag: Discard diagonal text (i.e., text that is not close to one of the 0, 90, 180, or 270 degree axes). This is useful for skipping watermarks drawn on body text.
-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.
-bbox-layout: Generate an XHTML file containing bounding box information for each block, line, and word in the file.
-tsv: Generate a TSV file containing the bounding box information for each block, line, and word in the file.
-cropbox: Use the crop box rather than the media box with -bbox and -bbox-layout.
-colspacing number: Specifies how much spacing we allow after a word before considering adjacent text to be a new column, measured as a fraction of the font size. Current default is 0.7, old releases had a 0.3 default.
-enc encoding-name: Sets the encoding to use for text output. This defaults to "UTF-8".
-listenc: Lists 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.)