Tribblix: manual page: pdftotext.1

pdftotext(1) User Commands pdftotext(1)

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. 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.)

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:

0 No error.

1 Error opening a PDF file.

2 Error opening an output file.

3 Error related to PDF permissions.

99 Other error.

AUTHOR

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