xenial (1) pstotext.1.gz

Provided by: pstotext_1.9-6_amd64 bug

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).

SEE ALSO

       pstotext  incorporates  technology  originally  developed  for  the  Virtual  Paper  project  at SRC; see
       http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/virtualpaper/.

       As mentioned above, pstotext invokes Ghostscript.  See gs(1) or http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/.

       Copyright 1995-8 Digital Equipment Corporation.
       Distributed only by permission.
       See file /usr/share/doc/pstotext/copyright for details.

       Last modified on Sat Feb  5 21:00:00 AEST 2000 by rjl
            modified on Fri Jun  5 14:02:37 PDT 1998 by mcjones
            modified on Wed Jun  7 17:47:56 PDT 1995 by birrell

       This  file  was   generated   automatically   by   mtex   software;   see   the   mtex   home   page   at
       http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/mtex/.

                                                                                                     pstotext(1)