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pdftotext (1)

Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter

(version 0.90)

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.

OPTIONS

    -f number

      Specifies the first page to convert.

    -l number

      Specifies the last page to convert.

    -ascii7

      Convert the text to 7-bit ASCII; the default is to use the 8-bit ISO Latin-1 character set.

    -eucjp

      Convert Japanese text to EUC-JP. This is currently the only option for converting Japanese text -- the only effect is to switch to 7-bit ASCII for non-Japanese text, in order to fit into the EUC-JP encoding. (This option is only available if pdftotext was compiled with Japanese support.)

    -raw

      Keep the text in content stream order. This is a hack which often "undoes" column formatting, etc. This option will likely be replaced with something more sophisticated when pdftotext is rewritten to use a smarter text placement algorithm.

    -q

      Don't print any messages or errors.

    -h

      Print usage information. ( -help is 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.

AUTHOR

    The pdftotext software and documentation are copyright 1996-1999 Derek B. Noonburg (derekn@foolabs.com).

SEE ALSO