PDF Tools

Overview

Read, extract text, convert, and manipulate PDF files using common CLI tools.

Reading PDFs

Extract text

# Using pdftotext (poppler-utils)
pdftotext document.pdf -         # stdout
pdftotext document.pdf output.txt

# Specific pages
pdftotext -f 1 -l 5 document.pdf -  # pages 1-5

# Layout mode (preserve formatting)
pdftotext -layout document.pdf -