man pdf2txt (1): extracts text contents of PDF files

SYNOPSIS

pdf2txt [option...] file...

DESCRIPTION

pdf2txt

extracts text contents from a PDF file. It extracts all the text that is to be rendered programmatically, i.e. text represented as ASCII or Unicode strings. It cannot recognize text drawn as images that would require optical character recognition. It also extracts the corresponding locations, font names, font sizes, writing direction (horizontal or vertical) for each text portion. You need to provide a password for protected PDF documents when its access is restricted. You cannot extract any text from a PDF document which does not have extraction permission.

OPTIONS

-o file

: Specifies the output file name. The default is to print the extracted contents to standand output in text format.

-p pageno[,pageno,...]

: Specifies the comma-separated list of the page numbers to be extracted. Page numbers start at one. By default, it extracts text from all the pages.

-c codec

: Specifies the output codec.

-t type

Specifies the output format. The following formats are currently supported:

text

: Text format. This is the default.

html

: HTML format. It is not recommended.

xml

: XML format. It provides the most information.

tag

: "Tagged PDF" format. A tagged PDF has its own contents annotated with HTML-like tags. pdf2txt tries to extract its content streams rather than inferring its text locations. Tags used here are defined in the m[blue]PDF Reference, Sixth Editionm[][1] (§10.7 "Tagged PDF").

-D writing-mode

Specifies the writing mode of text outputs:

lr-tb

: Left-to-right, top-to-bottom.

tb-rl

: Top-to-bottom, right-to-left.

auto

: Determine writing mode automatically

-M char-margin, -L line-margin, -W word-margin

: These are the parameters used for layout analysis. In an actual PDF file, text portions might be split into several chunks in the middle of its running, depending on the authoring software. Therefore, text extraction needs to splice text chunks. In the figure below, two text chunks whose distance is closer than the char-margin is considered continuous and get grouped into one. Also, two lines whose distance is closer than the line-margin is grouped as a text box, which is a rectangular area that contains a "cluster" of text portions. Furthermore, it may be required to insert blank characters (spaces) as necessary if the distance between two words is greater than the word-margin, as a blank between words might not be represented as a space, but indicated by the positioning of each word.
Each value is specified not as an actual length, but as a proportion of the length to the size of each character in question. The default values are char-margin = 1.0, line-margin = 0.3, and W = 0.2, respectively.

-n

: Suppress layout analysis.

-A

: Force layout analysis for all the text strings, including text contained in figures.

-V

: Enable detection of vertical writing.

-s scale

: Specifies the output scale. This option can be used in HTML format only.

-m n

: Specifies the maximum number of pages to extract. By default, all the pages in a document are extracted.

-P password

: Provides the user password to access PDF contents.

-d

: Increase the debug level.

EXAMPLES

Extract text as an HTML file whose filename is output.html:

$ pdf2txt -o output.html samples/naacl06-shinyama.pdf

Extract a Japanese HTML file in vertical writing:

$ pdf2txt -c euc-jp -D tb-rl -o output.html samples/jo.pdf

Extract text from an encrypted PDF file:

$ pdf2txt -P mypassword -o output.txt secret.pdf

AUTHORS

Jakub Wilk <[email protected]>

: Wrote this manual page for the Debian system.

Yusuke Shinyama <[email protected]>

: Author of PDFMiner and its original HTML documentation.

NOTES

1.

PDF Reference, Sixth Edition

: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.pdf