! Generated automatically by mantohlp 1 pdftotext pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text con- verter 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. 2 ONFIGURATION_FIL 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. 2 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
and 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]
-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.)
2 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.
2 XIT_CODE
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.
2 AUTHOR
The pdftotext software and documentation are copyright
1996-2002 Glyph & Cog, LLC.
2 SEE_ALSO
xpdf(1), pdftops(1), pdfinfo(1), pdffonts(1), pdftopbm(1),
pdfimages(1), xpdfrc(5)
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/