pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.03)
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. If
PDF-file is ´-', it reads the PDF
file from stdin.
-
-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.)
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:
- 0
- No error.
- 1
- Error opening a PDF file.
- 2
- Error opening an output file.
- 3
- Error related to PDF permissions.
- 99
- Other error.
The pdftotext software and documentation are copyright 1996-2011 Glyph &
Cog, LLC.
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