What it does
Poppler's command-line utilities include pdftotext for exporting PDF text. Its options select pages and crop areas and produce plain text or coordinate-bearing structured output.
Supply the PDF and a text filename, or use standard input/output in a pipeline. Choose ordinary reading order for prose, layout mode for physical spacing, or bounding-box/TSV output for coordinates. Page and crop options limit the export. Raw content-stream order is discouraged because it can undo column handling. Mangled font encodings may need OCR elsewhere; this text extraction command does not repair them. Poppler is GPL-licensed and also provides local library frontends; utility packaging and enabled components vary by build.
Strengths
- Provides reading-order, layout-preserving, and coordinate-based text exports.
Watch out for
- Raw content-stream mode is discouraged in the documentation.
Best for
- Scripted text extraction from selected PDF pages
Sources
- poppler_mirror/utils/pdftotext.1 at master · tsdgeos/poppler_mirror · GitHub (Oct 26, 2026)
- Poppler project source, data and programming frontends (Oct 26, 2026)
- Poppler repository GPL licence file (Oct 26, 2026)