pdftotext

Extract text from a PDF to stdout

$ pdftotext [file.pdf] -

$ pdftotext [file.pdf] [output.txt]

$ pdftotext -layout [file.pdf] [output.txt]

$ pdftotext -f [1] -l [5] [file.pdf] [output.txt]

$ pdftotext -raw [file.pdf] [output.txt]

$ pdftotext -upw [password] [file.pdf] [output.txt]

pdftotext [options] PDF-file [text-file]

pdftotext converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text. It extracts the text content from PDF documents while optionally attempting to preserve the visual layout of the original document.
The program is part of the poppler-utils package (or xpdf-utils on older systems) and handles most PDF text extraction needs. It can process encrypted PDFs when provided with the appropriate password and supports various output encodings.
Common use cases include making PDF content searchable, extracting text for further processing, creating accessible versions of documents, and feeding PDF content into text analysis pipelines.

-f number

First page to convert (default: 1)

Last page to convert (default: last page)

Maintain original physical layout of the text

Simple one-column page layout

Table mode, similar to layout but optimized for tables

Line printer mode with fixed-pitch font metrics

Keep strings in content stream order

Assume fixed-pitch font with specified character width

Output text encoding (Latin1, UTF-8, etc.)

Don't insert page breaks between pages

Owner password for encrypted PDF

User password for encrypted PDF

Quiet mode, suppress messages and errors

Print version information

Print usage information

Cannot extract text from scanned documents or image-based PDFs (use OCR tools like tesseract for those). Layout preservation may not be perfect for complex multi-column documents. Text in embedded fonts without Unicode mappings may not extract correctly. Ligatures and special characters may not render properly in all output encodings.

pdftotext was originally developed as part of the Xpdf project by Derek Noonburg in the late 1990s. The tool has since been incorporated into the Poppler library, a fork of Xpdf that has become the standard PDF rendering library on many Linux distributions. Both versions continue to be maintained, with Poppler receiving more active development and becoming the default on most modern systems.

pdfinfo(1), pdfimages(1), pdftops(1), tesseract(1), mutool(1)