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# pdftotext - Unix, Linux Command

# NAME

pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.00)

# 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, /etc/xpdf/xpdfrc. 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.

Tag | Description
--- | ---
-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)). 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 page breaks (form feed characters) between pages. [config file: textPageBreaks]
-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.)

# 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:

Tag | Description
--- | ---
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 1996-2004 Glyph & Cog, LLC.

# SEE ALSO

- xpdf (1)

- pdftops (1)

- pdfinfo (1)

- pdffonts (1)

- pdftoppm (1)

- pdfimages (1)

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

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