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Print contents of a PDF to the command line

Christopher Oezbek
andronikus

I’m looking for a command-line program that will print out the text of a PDF file, just like cat for a text file.

I’ve found pdftotxt, and that would be workable, but I’d prefer something that replicates the cat functionality because I want to pipe to grep. Thanks!

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Answer

On the man pages for pdftotext, I found this:

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

Description Pdftotext converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text.

Pdftotext reads the PDF file, PDF-file, and writes a text file, text-file. If text-file is not specified, pdftotext converts file.pdf to file.txt. If text-file is ‘-‘, the text is sent to stdout.

Thus to output to stdout in order to pipe to grep use this:

pdftotext mydoc.pdf - | grep mysearchterm