NAME

       pdf2txt - 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 standard 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 PDF Reference, Sixth Edition[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

SEE ALSO

       dumppdf(1)

AUTHORS

       Jakub Wilk <jwilk@debian.org>
           Wrote this manual page for the Debian system.

       Yusuke Shinyama <yusuke@cs.nyu.edu>
           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

pdf2txt                                            12/17/2022                                         PDF2TXT(1)