Extract text from a PDF using the commandline

pdfminer.six has several tools that can be used from the command line. The command-line tools are aimed at users that occasionally want to extract text from a pdf.

Take a look at the high-level or composable interface if you want to use pdfminer.six programmatically.

Examples

pdf2txt.py

$ pdf2txt.py example.pdf
all the text from the pdf appears on the command line

The pdf2txt.py tool extracts all the text from a PDF. It uses layout analysis with sensible defaults to order and group the text in a sensible way.

dumppdf.py

$ dumppdf.py -a example.pdf
<pdf><object id="1">
...
</object>
...
</pdf>

The dumppdf.py tool can be used to extract the internal structure from a PDF. This tool is primarily for debugging purposes, but that can be useful to anybody working with PDF’s.