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pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version
2.02)
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.
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 /usr/local/etc/xpdfrc (but this location can be changed when
pdftotext is built). See the xpdfrc(5)
man page for details.
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.
- -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.
- -enc encoding-name
- Sets the encoding to use for text output. The encoding-name must be defined
with the unicodeMap command (see xpdfrc(5)
). 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]
- -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. [config file: errQuiet]
- -cfg config-file
- Read config-file in place of ~/.xpdfrc or the system-wide config
file.
- -v
- Print copyright and version information.
- -h
- Print usage information.
(-help and --help are 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 Xpdf tools use the following
exit codes:
- No error.
- Error opening a PDF file.
- Error opening an output file.
- Error related to PDF permissions.
- Other error.
The pdftotext software
and documentation are copyright 1996-2003 Glyph & Cog, LLC.
xpdf(1)
,
pdftops(1)
, pdfinfo(1)
, pdffonts(1)
, pdftopbm(1)
, pdfimages(1)
, xpdfrc(5)
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/
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