Ubuntu Manpage: pstotext - extract ASCII text from a PostScript or PDF file

NAME

       pstotext - extract ASCII text from a PostScript or PDF file

SYNTAX

       pstotext [option|pathname]...

       where option includes:

       -cork
       -landscape
       -landscapeOther
       -portrait
       -
       -output file
       -gs command
       -debug
       -bboxes

DESCRIPTION

pstotext reads one or more PostScript or PDF files, and writes to standard output a representation of the
plain text that would be displayed if the PostScript file were printed. As is described in the DETAILS
section below, this representation is only an approximation. Nevertheless, it is often useful for
information retrieval (e.g., running grep(1) or building a full-text index) or to recover the text from a
PostScript file whose source you have lost.

pstotext calls Ghostscript, and requires Aladdin Ghostscript version 3.51 or newer. Ghostscript must be
invokable on the current search path as gs. Alternatively, you can use the -gs option to specify the
command (pathname and options) to run Ghostscript. For example, on Windows you might use -gs
"c:\gs\gswin32c.exe -Ic:\gs;c:\gs\fonts".

pstotext reads and processes its command line from left to right, ignoring the case of options. When it
encounters a pathname, it opens the file and expects to find a PostScript job or PDF document to process.
The option - means to read and process a PostScript job from standard input. If no - or pathname
arguments are encountered, pstotext reads a PostScript job from standard input. (PDF documents require
random access, hence cannot be read from standard input.) You can use the -output option to specify an
output file (remember to invoke it before the input file); otherwise pstotext writes to standard output.

The option -cork is only relevant for PostScript files produced by dvips from TeX or LaTeX documents; it
tells pstotext to use the Cork encoding (known as T1 in LaTeX) rather than the old TeX text encoding
(known as OT1 in LaTeX). Unfortunately files produced by dvips don't distinguish which font encodings
were used.

The options -landscape and -landscapeOther should be used for documents that must be rotated 90 degrees
clockwise or counterclockwise, respectively, in order to be readable.

The options -debug and -bboxes are mostly of use for the maintainers of pstotext. -debug shows
Ghostscript output and error messages. -bboxes outputs one word per line with bounding box information.

DETAILS

pstotext does its work by telling Ghostscript to load a PostScript library that causes it to write to its
standard output information about each string rendered by a PostScript job or PDF document. This
information includes the characters of the string, and enough additional information to approximate the
string's bounding rectangle. pstotext post-processes this information and outputs a sequence of words
delimited by space, newline, and formfeed.

pstotext outputs words in the same sequence as they are rendered by the document. This usually, but not
always, follows the order that a human would read the words on a page. Within this sequence, words are
separated by either space or newline depending on whether or not they fall on the same line. Each page
is terminated with a formfeed. If you use the incorrect option from the set {-portrait, -landscape,
-landscapeOther}, pstotext is likely to substitute newline for space.

A PostScript job or PDF document often renders one word as several strings in order to get correct
spacing between particular pairs of characters. pstotext does its best to assemble these strings back
into words, using a simple heuristic: strings separated by a distance of less than 0.3 times the minimum
of the average character widths in the two strings are considered to be part of the same word. Note that
this typically causes leading and trailing punctuation characters to be included with a word.

The PostScript language provides a flexible encoding scheme by which character codes in strings select
specific characters (symbols), so a PostScript job is free to use any character code. On the other hand,
pstotext always translates to the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character code, which is an extension to ASCII
covering most of the Western European languages. When a character isn't present in ISO 8859-1, pstotext
uses a sequence of characters, e.g., "---" for em dash or "A\226" for Abreve. pstotext can be fooled by
a font whose Encoding vector doesn't follow Adobe's conventions, but it contains heuristics allowing it
to handle a wide variety of misbehaving fonts.

(pstotext no longer translates hyphen (\255) to minus (\055).)

AUTHOR

       Andrew Birrell (PostScript libraries),  Paul  McJones  (application),  Russell  Lang  (Windows  and  OS/2
       adaptation), and Hunter Goatley (VMS adaptation).

COPYRIGHT