Convert PDF to text without pdftotext?

Question

I have to convert PDFs to text and currently I am using pdftotext.exe. This messes up the resulting text sometimes and so I can't use that.

Is there another free tool that I can call from another program? I'd prefer a command line tool.

try this one: https://github.com/luochen1990/nodejs-easy-pdf-parser — luochen1990, Jul 14 '18 at 08:59

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 17 '12 at 09:00

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PDF can be tricky to convert to Text depending on how its constructed, but you may get good results from iTextSharp or GhostScript or a commercial component eg: from www.tallcomponents.com (not affiliated)

answered Jan 17 '12 at 09:00

Mark Redman

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Can iTextSharp also convert from PDF to TXT? – EOB Jan 17 '12 at 14:32
It can extract text, see here for an example and other options: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4711134/itextsharp-text-extraction – Mark Redman Jan 17 '12 at 17:19

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 17 '12 at 12:27

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PDF files do not generally contain any structure so the software needs to guess it. I wrote a blog post on the issues at http://www.jpedal.org/PDFblog/2009/04/pdf-text/

You could also try PdfBox.

answered Jan 17 '12 at 12:27

mark stephens

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 10 '13 at 13:40

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I find that Apache PDFBox is much better than pdftotext. It extracts text in a way that is much closer to the original formatting of the document. It can be run from the command line.

answered Apr 10 '13 at 13:40

bcoughlan

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Convert PDF to text without pdftotext?

3 Answers3