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A fast and accurate command line tool for extracting text from PDF files. The main features are:
- accurate detection of words, text lines and text blocks
- splitting ligatures into separate characters, for example: ffi into f, f, and i.
- merging characters with combining diacritical marks to single characters, for example: `a to à .
- detecting the semantic roles (for example: title, author, section heading, paragraph, footnote) of text blocks
- detecting the natural reading order of text blocks
- merging hyphenated words
- detecting sub- and superscripts
- customizable output of the extracted text, for example: in plain text format, or in a structured format (JSONL) in which the text is annotated with layout information (for example: the font, the font size, or the position).
pdftotext++ is based on Poppler's pdftotext and written in C++. There are several installation options (for example, via Apt, Docker, or building from source), see the description below.
Extract the plain text from file.pdf and output it to the console:
pdftotext++ file.pdf
Extract the plain text from file.pdf and write it to output.txt:
pdftotext++ file.pdf output.txt
Extract the words from file.pdf and output them together with layout information in JSONL format:
pdftotext++ --output-words file.pdf
Extract the text from file.pdf, output it to the console, and create a PDF file words.pdf in which a bounding box is drawn around each detected word (this is particularly useful for debugging purposes):
pdftotext++ --visualize-words --visualization-path words.pdf file.pdf
Print the full usage information:
pdftotext++ --help
(1) Install required packages (for example, to allow Apt to use a repository over HTTPS):
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y ca-certificates curl gnupg lsb-release
(2) Add pdftotext++'s official GPG key:
sudo mkdir -m 0755 -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://pdftotext.cs.uni-freiburg.de/download/apt/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/pdftotext-plus-plus.gpg
(3) Add the repository and install pdftotext++:
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/pdftotext-plus-plus.gpg] https://pdftotext.cs.uni-freiburg.de/download/apt $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pdftotext-plus-plus.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y pdftotext++
(4) Run pdftotext++ (type pdftotext++ --help to see the full usage information):
pdftotext++ [options] <pdf-file> <output-file>
(1) Clone the project:
git clone [email protected]:ad-freiburg/pdftotext-plus-plus.git
cd pdftotext-plus-plus
(2) Build a Docker image:
docker build -f Dockerfiles/Dockerfile -t pdftotext-plus-plus .
(3) Run pdftotext++
docker run --rm -it -v <pdf-file>:/file.pdf --name pdftotext-plus-plus pdftotext-plus-plus [options] /file.pdf <output-file>
(1) Download the DEB package associated with your distribution from the latest release (or from an older release listed on the release page).
(2) Install the package and its dependencies.
dpkg -i ./pdftotext-plus-plus_1.0.0-0focal_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get -fy install
Note In the first of the two commands above, change the path to that of the package you have downloaded.
Note If the first command produces one or more "Package <name> is not installed" errors, you can safely ignore them. The second command fixes these errors.
(3) Run pdftotext++ (type pdftotext++ --help to see the full usage information):
pdftotext++ [options] <pdf-file> <output-file>
(1) Clone the project and run the install script:
git clone [email protected]:ad-freiburg/pdftotext-plus-plus.git
cd pdftotext-plus-plus
sudo make install
(2) Run pdftotext++ (type pdftotext++ --help to see the full usage information):
pdftotext++ [options] <pdf-file> <output-file>
- See the documentation for a technical reference of pdftotext++. It contains descriptions of all available classes, modules, methods and arguments.
- TODO: changelog