pdf2txt

Extract raw text from PDF files

Background

pdf2txt is a command line application based on rsc.io/pdf library for parsing PDF files.

Russ Cox's PDF library has a bug where he ignores any space characters. https://github.com/rsc/pdf/blob/master/page.go#L422

Many folks have sent pull requests to fix the bug, but since the library is no longer used by him, he has chosen to ignore those requests. There might be a reason why he chose to ignore space characters.

It is apparently a very simple bug fix, eliminate the if statement. https://github.com/shakeel/pdf2txt/blob/master/pdf/page.go#L422

I have copied https://github.com/rsc/pdf/ to this code repo https://github.com/shakeel/pdf2txt/tree/master/pdf

All credit for the PDF library belongs to Russ Cox https://swtch.com/~rsc/ , one of my favorite programmers.

How to use pdf2txt

1. Install GoLang version 1.11 or above from https://golang.org/dl/ and follow instructions to setup the GoLang development environment.
2. mkdir ~/devel
3. git clone https://github.com/shakeel/pdf2txt
4. cd pdf2txt
5. go build
6. The above step creates pdf2txt.exe in the pdf2txt folder. You can copy it anywhere such as ~/bin and ensure that ~/bin is in your PATH.
7. Run pdf2txt and specify a PDF file to convert to text.

Usage

Usage of pdf2txt:

pdf2txt [flags] pdf-file ...

  -out filepath
        filepath for writing output (default "./out/")
  -verbose
        verbose output

If you do not specify -out option the text file will be in the ./out folder and the filename will be the same as your PDF file with the extension replaced with .txt.

Enjoy!