How to get the text or the images out of a PDF

There are three different jobs hiding in this one, and they need different tools. The text is easy whenever the PDF has real text in it. The pictures can be taken out exactly as they were put in, byte for byte, but only with a command. Whole pages as images is a render, which any of these routes can do.

pdftotext report.pdf report.txt        # the text
pdfimages -all report.pdf img          # the pictures, as they were stored
pdftoppm -png -r 150 report.pdf page   # every page as a 150 dpi PNG

Get the text

pdftotext writes the text in reading order. On our three-page sample report (poppler 25.03.0) it found 197 words, the same 197 the browser tool finds.

Add -layout when the position on the page matters, such as a table or two columns side by side. Without it, the bar chart's labels come out as a list, values first and then the months:

92k

74k
61k
55k
48k
42k

Jan

Feb

With -layout, each value sits over its month again, as it does on the page:

pdftotext -layout report.pdf report.txt

                                                                      74k

                                                      61k
                                      55k
                     48k
     42k




      Jan             Feb             Mar             Apr             May              Jun

Use -f 2 -l 4 to take only pages 2 to 4. Add a single - instead of a file name to print the text to the terminal.

On a Mac without poppler, open the PDF in Preview, press ⌘A and ⌘C, and paste it where you need it. For a long document, a file is easier to check than a clipboard.

In the browser

The tool keeps the PDF's line breaks, but on our sample it also put an empty line after every line of a paragraph, as the picture above shows, so the .txt comes out double-spaced. Columns and tables come out as running text, like pdftotext without -layout: for a table, use the command.

Get the pictures out, at their original quality

pdfimages -list shows every picture stored in the PDF without writing anything:

pdfimages -list report.pdf

page   num  type   width height color comp bpc  enc interp  object ID x-ppi y-ppi size ratio
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   1     0 image    1200   800  rgb     3   8  jpeg   no         7  0   184   184 31.0K 1.1%

Then -all writes each one in the format it is stored in. A JPEG comes out as the original .jpg, not decoded and saved again:

pdfimages -all report.pdf img

That wrote one file, img-000.jpg, 1200 by 800 pixels and 31,752 bytes. Its SHA-256 matched the image stream inside the PDF exactly, so nothing was lost. Without -all, pdfimages decodes every picture to PPM, which is large and no better. Add -p to put the page number in each file name.

None of our browser tools pulls embedded pictures out of a PDF. PDF to JPG and PDF to PNG render pages, which is the next section. If you need the photo as it was sent, pdfimages is the route.

Turn whole pages into images

This is a render: each page is drawn at the resolution you choose, text, pictures and charts together, and saved as one image.

pdftoppm -png -r 150 report.pdf page

That wrote page-1.png to page-3.png, each 1240 by 1755 pixels (A4 at 150 dpi), at 177 KB, 67 KB and 60 KB. Use -jpeg instead of -png for photo-heavy pages, -r 300 to print, and -f 2 -l 2 for one page.

In the browser

What each route gives you

On the same three-page report (a photo on page 1, a drawn chart on page 2):

The photo is stored at 1200 by 800 and placed at 184 PPI. Rendering the page at 300 dpi makes the photo's area on the page bigger in pixels, but there is no detail in it that the 1200 by 800 original did not have.

If you get no text: the PDF is a scan

A scanner, or a phone app that "scans" a document, saves each page as one picture. There is no text in the file, only an image of it. To test, we turned the first page of the report into a picture-only PDF:

pdftotext scan.pdf -

It printed nothing at all: the output is a single form-feed character, the page break, and no words. PDF to Text shows No selectable text found. This PDF may be a scan, so try an OCR tool instead. pdffonts scan.pdf makes the same point from the other side: it lists no fonts.

The honest answer is OCR, which reads the letters off the picture. ocrmypdf puts an invisible text layer behind each page and keeps the page looking the same, so the result is still a PDF you can search and copy from:

brew install ocrmypdf          # or: apt install ocrmypdf
ocrmypdf scan.pdf searchable.pdf
pdftotext searchable.pdf searchable.txt

With ocrmypdf 16.7.0 and Tesseract 5.5.0, every word of the body text came back right. It missed the white-on-purple heading and the small grey caption under the photo: 56 of the page's 72 words. Low contrast and small type are where OCR fails, so read the result before you rely on it.

On a Mac, Preview can do this too. Apple's instructions: open the scanned PDF, choose File › Export… and select Embed Text. The option only appears when Preview has found no text in the document. See Embed text in a PDF.

None of our tools does OCR. PDF to Text reads the text that is in the file and tells you when there is none.

Which to use

• The text, any device: PDF to Text, then Copy or Download. Use pdftotext -layout for tables and columns.
• A photo or logo as it was sent: pdfimages -all. Nothing in the browser does this.
• A page as a picture: PDF to PNG for documents, PDF to JPG for scans, or pdftoppm for a folder of PDFs.
• A scan: ocrmypdf or Preview's Embed Text first, then any of the above.

When you have the .txt, it opens in any editor. Images from pdfimages and the page renders open in any image viewer, and the ZIP from the browser tools unpacks with a double-click.