.\" Copyright 1997-2011 Glyph & Cog, LLC
.TH pdftotext 1 "15 August 2011"
.SH NAME
pdftotext \- Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter
(version 3.03)
.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.  If
.I PDF-file
is \'-', it reads the PDF file from stdin.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.BI \-f " number"
Specifies the first page to convert.
.TP
.BI \-l " number"
Specifies the last page to convert.
.TP
.BI \-r " number"
Specifies the resolution, in DPI.  The default is 72 DPI.
.TP
.BI \-x " number"
Specifies the x-coordinate of the crop area top left corner
.TP
.BI \-y " number"
Specifies the y-coordinate of the crop area top left corner
.TP
.BI \-W " number"
Specifies the width of crop area in pixels (default is 0)
.TP
.BI \-H " number"
Specifies the height of crop area in pixels (default is 0)
.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
.BI \-fixed " number"
Assume fixed-pitch (or tabular) text, with the specified character
width (in points).  This forces physical layout mode.
.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 \-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.
.TP
.B \-htmlmeta
Generate a simple HTML file, including the meta information.  This
simply wraps the text in <pre> and </pre> and prepends the meta
headers.
.TP
.B \-bbox
Generate an XHTML file containing bounding box information for each
word in the file.
.TP
.B \-bbox-layout
Generate an XHTML file containing bounding box information for each
block, line, and word in the file.
.TP
.B \-tsv
Generate a TSV file containing the bounding box information for each
block, line, and word in the file.
.TP
.B \-cropbox
Use the crop box rather than the media box with \-bbox and \-bbox-layout.
.TP
.BI \-colspacing " number"
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.
.TP
.BI \-enc " encoding-name"
Sets the encoding to use for text output. This defaults to "UTF-8".
.TP
.B \-listenc
Lists the available encodings
.TP
.BI \-eol " unix | dos | mac"
Sets the end-of-line convention to use for text output.
.TP
.B \-nopgbrk
Don't insert page breaks (form feed characters) between pages.
.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.
.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 1996-2011 Glyph
& Cog, LLC.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR pdfdetach (1),
.BR pdffonts (1),
.BR pdfimages (1),
.BR pdfinfo (1),
.BR pdftocairo (1),
.BR pdftohtml (1),
.BR pdftoppm (1),
.BR pdftops (1),
.BR pdfseparate (1),
.BR pdfsig (1),
.BR pdfunite (1)