pstotext(1)pstotext(1)NAMEpstotext - extract ASCII text from a PostScript or PDF
file
SYNTAXpstotext [option|pathname]...
where option includes:
-cork
-landscape
-landscapeOther
-portrait
-
-output file
-gs command
-debug
-bboxes
DESCRIPTIONpstotext 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. Neverthe
less, 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. Alterna
tively, 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 dis
tinguish 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.
DETAILSpstotext 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 infor
mation to approximate the string's bounding rectangle.
pstotext post-processes this information and outputs a
sequence of words delimited by space, newline, and form
feed.
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 sub
stitute 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 trail
ing 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 West
ern 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 ALSOpstotext 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
Copyright 1995-8 Digital Equipment Corporation.
Distributed only by permission.
See file pstotext.txt 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.digi
tal.com/SRC/mtex/.
pstotext(1)
