pdftotext
agent-ready non-interactive
Extracts text from PDF files with layout preservation. Part of the poppler-utils package, widely available on all platforms.
How to install pdftotext
brew install poppler When to use pdftotext
- Extracting structured text from PDFs that have complex layouts (e.g., multi-column documents, brochures) where preserving the reading order and spatial arrangement is important.
- Selectively extracting text from a specific range of pages (e.g., only chapters 3-5 of a book) to reduce processing time or isolate relevant content.
- Extracting text from password-protected PDFs when the correct password is known, as pdftotext supports encrypted PDFs.
When not to use pdftotext
- Processing scanned PDFs that consist of images rather than embedded text, because pdftotext does not perform OCR and will return empty or garbage output.
- Extracting tabular data where perfect cell-by-cell accuracy is required; while pdftotext preserves layout, it does not understand table structure and may mix content across rows/columns.
pdftotext features
- · Layout preservation
- · Page range selection
- · Bounding box extraction
- · Encrypted PDF support
- · Fast C-based processing
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