xpdftotext(1)

pdftotext(1)

General Commands Manual

pdftotext(1)

NAME

pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 4.06)

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.

CONFIGURATION FILE

Pdftotext reads a configuration file at startup. It first tries to find the user's private config file, ~/.xpdfrc. If that doesn't exist, it looks for a system-wide config file, typically /etc/xpdfrc (but this location can be changed when pdftotext is built). See the xpdfrc(5) man page for details.

OPTIONS

Many of the following options can be set with configuration file commands. These are listed in square brackets with the description of the corresponding command line option.

-f number: Specifies the first page to convert.
-l number: Specifies the last page to convert.
-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. If the -fixed option is given, character spacing within each line will be determined by the specified character pitch.
-simple: Similar to -layout, but optimized for simple one-column pages. This mode will do a better job of maintaining horizontal spacing, but it will only work properly with a single column of text.
-simple2: Similar to -simple, but handles slightly rotated text (e.g., OCR output) better. Only works for pages with a single column of text.
-table: Table mode is similar to physical layout mode, but optimized for tabular data, with the goal of keeping rows and columns aligned (at the expense of inserting extra whitespace). If the -fixed option is given, character spacing within each line will be determined by the specified character pitch.
-lineprinter: Line printer mode uses a strict fixed-character-pitch and -height layout. That is, the page is broken into a grid, and characters are placed into that grid. If the grid spacing is too small for the actual characters, the result is extra whitespace. If the grid spacing is too large, the result is missing whitespace. The grid spacing can be specified using the -fixed and -linespacing options. If one or both are not given on the command line, pdftotext will attempt to compute appropriate value(s).
-raw: Keep the text in content stream order. Depending on how the PDF file was generated, this may or may not be useful.
-fixed number: Specify the character pitch (character width), in points, for physical layout, table, or line printer mode. This is ignored in all other modes.
-linespacing number: Specify the line spacing, in points, for line printer mode. This is ignored in all other modes.
-clip: Text which is hidden because of clipping is removed before doing layout, and then added back in. This can be helpful for tables where clipped (invisible) text would overlap the next column.
-nodiag: Diagonal text, i.e., text that is not close to one of the 0, 90, 180, or 270 degree axes, is discarded. This is useful to skip watermarks drawn on top of body text, etc.
-enc encoding-name: Sets the encoding to use for text output. The encoding-name must be defined with the unicodeMap command (see xpdfrc(5)). The encoding name is case-sensitive. This defaults to "Latin1" (which is a built-in encoding). [config file: textEncoding]
-eol unix | dos | mac: Sets the end-of-line convention to use for text output. [config file: textEOL]
-nopgbrk: Don't insert a page breaks (form feed character) at the end of each page. [config file: textPageBreaks]
-bom: Insert a Unicode byte order marker (BOM) at the start of the text output.
-marginl number: Specifies the left margin, in points. Text in the left margin (i.e., within that many points of the left edge of the page) is discarded. The default value is zero.
-marginr number: Specifies the right margin, in points. Text in the right margin (i.e., within that many points of the right edge of the page) is discarded. The default value is zero.
-margint number: Specifies the top margin, in points. Text in the top margin (i.e., within that many points of the top edge of the page) is discarded. The default value is zero.
-marginb number: Specifies the bottom margin, in points. Text in the bottom margin (i.e., within that many points of the bottom edge of the page) is discarded. The default value is zero.
-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.
-verbose: Print a status message (to stdout) before processing each page. [config file: printStatusInfo]
-q: Don't print any messages or errors. [config file: errQuiet]
-cfg config-file: Read config-file in place of ~/.xpdfrc or the system-wide config file.
-listencodings: List all available text output encodings, then exit.
-v: Print copyright and version information, then exit.
-h: Print usage information, then exit. (-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.
98: Out of memory.
99: Other error.