pdftotext(1) pdftotext(1) NAME pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text con- verter (version 2.03) 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. 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 /usr/local/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 configura- tion 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 physi- cal 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 
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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: tex- tEncoding] -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. Pro- viding 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 sys- tem-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: 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 1996-2003 Glyph & Cog, LLC. SEE ALSO xpdf(1), pdftops(1), pdfinfo(1), pdffonts(1), pdftopbm(1), pdfimages(1), xpdfrc(5) http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/ 10 October 2003 pdftotext(1)