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