Make sure there are single quotes, not double, around “password”. Pdftotext -opw ‘password’ /home/lori/Documents/Sample.pdf /home/lori/Documents/Sample.txtĬhange “password” to the one used to protect the original PDF file being converted. To convert a PDF file that’s protected and encrypted with an owner password, use the “-opw” flag (the first character in the flag is a lowercase letter “O”, not a zero). Pdftotext -f 5 -l 9 /home/lori/Documents/Sample.pdf /home/lori/Documents/Sample.txt If you want to only convert a range of pages in a PDF file, use the “-f” and “-l” (a lowercase “L”) flags to specify the first and last pages in the range you want to convert. Pdftotext -layout /home/lori/Documents/Sample.pdf /home/lori/Documents/Sample.txt You can preserve the layout of your document (headers, footers, paging, etc.) from the original PDF file in the converted text file using the “-layout” flag. Line breaks are inserted after every line of text in the PDF file. The converted text may have line breaks in places you don’t want. The text file is created and can be opened just as you would open any other text file in Linux. Also, change the filenames to correspond to the names of your files. Pdftotext /home/lori/Documents/Sample.pdf /home/lori/Documents/Sample.txtĬhange the path to each file to correspond to the location and name of your original PDF file and where you want to save the resulting text file.

Press “Ctrl + Alt + T” to open a Terminal window, type the command at the prompt, and press “Enter”.

The following is the basic command for converting a PDF file to an editable text file.

Open old mac text file in linux