.\" Copyright 1997-2007 Glyph & Cog, LLC .TH pdftotext 1 "27 Febuary 2007" .SH NAME pdftotext \- Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.02) .SH SYNOPSIS .B pdftotext [options] .RI [ PDF-file .RI [ text-file ]] .SH DESCRIPTION .B Pdftotext converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text. .PP Pdftotext reads the PDF file, .IR PDF-file , and writes a text file, .IR text-file . If .I text-file is not specified, pdftotext converts .I file.pdf to .IR file.txt . If .I text-file is \'-', the text is sent to stdout. .SH 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 .BR xpdfrc (5) man page for details. .SH 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. .TP .BI \-f " number" Specifies the first page to convert. .TP .BI \-l " number" Specifies the last page to convert. .TP .B \-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. .TP .B \-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. .TP .B \-htmlmeta Generate a simple HTML file, including the meta information. This simply wraps the text in
andand prepends the meta headers. .TP .BI \-enc " encoding-name" Sets the encoding to use for text output. The .I encoding\-name must be defined with the unicodeMap command (see .BR xpdfrc (5)). The encoding name is case-sensitive. This defaults to "Latin1" (which is a built-in encoding). .RB "[config file: " textEncoding ] .TP .BI \-eol " unix | dos | mac" Sets the end-of-line convention to use for text output. .RB "[config file: " textEOL ] .TP .B \-nopgbrk Don't insert page breaks (form feed characters) between pages. .RB "[config file: " textPageBreaks ] .TP .BI \-opw " password" Specify the owner password for the PDF file. Providing this will bypass all security restrictions. .TP .BI \-upw " password" Specify the user password for the PDF file. .TP .B \-q Don't print any messages or errors. .RB "[config file: " errQuiet ] .TP .BI \-cfg " config-file" Read .I config-file in place of ~/.xpdfrc or the system-wide config file. .TP .B \-v Print copyright and version information. .TP .B \-h Print usage information. .RB ( \-help and .B \-\-help are equivalent.) .SH 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. .SH EXIT CODES The Xpdf tools use the following exit codes: .TP 0 No error. .TP 1 Error opening a PDF file. .TP 2 Error opening an output file. .TP 3 Error related to PDF permissions. .TP 99 Other error. .SH AUTHOR The pdftotext software and documentation are copyright 1996-2007 Glyph & Cog, LLC. .SH "SEE ALSO" .BR xpdf (1), .BR pdftops (1), .BR pdfinfo (1), .BR pdffonts (1), .BR pdftoppm (1), .BR pdfimages (1), .BR xpdfrc (5) .br .B http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/