Ubuntu – better pdf to text converter than pdftotext

conversionpdf

I'm using pdftotext (part of poppler-utils) to convert PDF documents to text. It works, for the most part, but one thing I wish it did was to insert blank lines between separate paragraphs instead of mashing them together.

Is there way to get pdftotext to do this? And if not, is there another pdf to text utility that can do this?

Best Answer

You could try ebook-convert from Calibre.

If anything, I'd say it errs in the other direction: too many line breaks.

Another thing I'd definitely consider though is converting to HTML using pdfreflow, and then convert the HTML to TXT.

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Ubuntu – better way to redact a PDF

(originally I recommened Okular but it didn't work as I expected)

1. Edit the document in a vector editor

I was able to open a PDF file in Inkscape, draw a rectangle over a piece of text and print it out. Inkscape is a vector editor so no rasterization involved. Some fonts looked wrong though - probably because the document was created on Windows machine with fonts which are absent on mine.

Note that any method that does not involve rasterization is only acceptable if you're going to print the redacted document on paper and not distribute it electronically, as the text still can be retrieved from under blackouts.

2. Increase the rasterization resolution when opening in a bitmap editor

Regarding "quality loss" when opening the page in Gimp: you can directly open a PDF file in Gimp. It will be rasterized in the process. The amount of quality loss in the process is a matter of resolution you choose when importing - 300 dpi should give you a very decent quality (the default is 100).

You can also get good results with ImageMagick's convert command if you tell it to increase resolution:

convert -density 300x300 ...

Ubuntu – How to convert all pdf files to text (within a folder) with one command

The following will convert all files in the current directory:

for file in *.pdf; do pdftotext "$file" "$file.txt"; done

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Ubuntu – better way to redact a PDF

Ubuntu – How to convert all pdf files to text (within a folder) with one command

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