pdftotext(1) General Commands Manual pdftotext(1) # [NAME](#NAME) pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.03) # [SYNOPSIS](#SYNOPSIS) **pdftotext** \[options] PDF-file \[*text-file*] # [DESCRIPTION](#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. If *PDF-file* is ´-', it reads the PDF file from stdin. # [OPTIONS](#OPTIONS) [**-f number**](#f) Specifies the first page to convert. [**-l number**](#l) Specifies the last page to convert. [**-r number**](#r) Specifies the resolution, in DPI. The default is 72 DPI. [**-x number**](#x) Specifies the x-coordinate of the crop area top left corner [**-y number**](#y) Specifies the y-coordinate of the crop area top left corner [**-W number**](#W) Specifies the width of crop area in pixels (default is 0) [**-H number**](#H) Specifies the height of crop area in pixels (default is 0) [**-layout**](#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. [**-fixed number**](#fixed) Assume fixed-pitch (or tabular) text, with the specified character width (in points). This forces physical layout mode. [**-raw**](#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. [**-remove-hyphens mode**](#remove-hyphens) Controls end-of-line hyphen handling. *mode* is one of: [**all**](#all) Remove end-of-line hyphens (U+002D, U+2010, U+FE63, U+FF0D) and Unicode soft hyphens (U+00AD), merging words across lines (default). [**soft**](#soft) Remove only Unicode soft hyphens (U+00AD), merging words across lines. ASCII and other hyphen characters are preserved. [**none**](#none) Keep all end-of-line hyphens and line breaks unchanged. This option has no effect in -raw or -layout mode. [**-nodiag**](#nodiag) Discard diagonal text (i.e., text that is not close to one of the 0, 90, 180, or 270 degree axes). This is useful for skipping watermarks drawn on body text. [**-htmlmeta**](#htmlmeta) Generate a simple HTML file, including the meta information. This simply wraps the text in <pre> and </pre> and prepends the meta headers. [**-bbox**](#bbox) Generate an XHTML file containing bounding box information for each word in the file. [**-bbox-layout**](#bbox-layout) Generate an XHTML file containing bounding box information for each block, line, and word in the file. [**-tsv**](#tsv) Generate a TSV file containing the bounding box information for each block, line, and word in the file. [**-cropbox**](#cropbox) Use the crop box rather than the media box with -bbox and -bbox-layout. [**-colspacing number**](#colspacing) Specifies how much spacing we allow after a word before considering adjacent text to be a new column, measured as a fraction of the font size. Current default is 0.7, old releases had a 0.3 default. [**-enc encoding-name**](#enc) Sets the encoding to use for text output. This defaults to "UTF-8". [**-listenc**](#listenc) Lists the available encodings [**-eol unix | dos | mac**](#eol) Sets the end-of-line convention to use for text output. [**-nopgbrk**](#nopgbrk) Don't insert page breaks (form feed characters) between pages. [**-opw password**](#opw) Specify the owner password for the PDF file. Providing this will bypass all security restrictions. [**-upw password**](#upw) Specify the user password for the PDF file. [**-q**](#q) Don't print any messages or errors. [**-v**](#v) Print copyright and version information. [**-h**](#h) Print usage information. (**-help** and **--help** are equivalent.) # [BUGS](#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](#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](#AUTHOR) The pdftotext software and documentation are copyright 1996-2011 Glyph & Cog, LLC. # [SEE ALSO](#SEE_ALSO) [**pdfdetach**(1)](/man/os/poppler/pdfdetach.1), [**pdffonts**(1)](/man/os/poppler/pdffonts.1), [**pdfimages**(1)](/man/os/poppler/pdfimages.1), [**pdfinfo**(1)](/man/os/poppler/pdfinfo.1), [**pdftocairo**(1)](/man/os/poppler/pdftocairo.1), [**pdftohtml**(1)](/man/os/poppler/pdftohtml.1), [**pdftoppm**(1)](/man/os/poppler/pdftoppm.1), [**pdftops**(1)](/man/os/poppler/pdftops.1), [**pdfseparate**(1)](/man/os/poppler/pdfseparate.1), [**pdfsig**(1)](/man/os/poppler/pdfsig.1), [**pdfunite**(1)](/man/os/poppler/pdfunite.1) 15 August 2011 --- Document: pdftotext(1) from poppler 26.08.0-r1 (Chainguard OS) Source: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler.git