A Light Solution to Convert Text to PDF in Linux

a light solution to convert text to pdf in Linux

One way would be to use enscript followed by ps2pdf

enscript -p file.ps file.txt
ps2pdf file.ps file.pdf

Extracting Text from a PDF file with embedded font

In this case I recommend to NOT use ImageMagick for the PDF -> TIFF conversion. Instead, use Ghostscript. Two reasons:

1. Using Ghostscript directly will give you more control over individual parameters of the conversion.

2. ImageMagick cannot do that particular conversion itself -- it will call Ghostscript as its 'delegate' anyway, but will not allow you to give all the same fine-grained control that your own Ghostscript command will give you.

Most of the text in the table of your sample PDF is extremely small (I guess, only 4 or 5 pt high). This makes it rather difficult to run a successful OCR unless you increase the resolution considerably.

Ghostscript uses -r72 by default for image format output (such as TIFF). Tesseract works best with r=300 or r=400 -- but only for a font size from 10-12 pt or higher. Therefor, to compensate for the small text size you should make Ghostscript using a resolution of at least 1200 DPI when it renders the PDF to the image.

Also, you'll have to rotate the image so the text displays in the normal reading direction (not bottom -> top).

This is the command which I would try first:

gs                              \
  -o sample.tif                 \
  -sDEVICE=tiffg4               \
  -r1200                        \
  -dAutoRotatePages=/PageByPage \
   sample_rotate-0.pdf

You may need to play with variations of the -r1200 parameter (higher or lower) for best results.

Bash To Convert PDF Files In Multiple Subdirectories

You can use the find command with the option -exec to trigger the conversion:

find /path/to/your/root/pdf/folder -type f -name "*.pdf" -exec bash -c 'pdftohtml -c -i -s "$1"' _ {} \;

The pdftohtml is executed for every pdf file found. Note that {} represents the pdf file.

Merge / convert multiple PDF files into one PDF

I'm sorry, I managed to find the answer myself using google and a bit of luck : )

For those interested;

I installed the pdftk (pdf toolkit) on our debian server, and using the following command I achieved desired output:

pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output output.pdf

OR

gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf ...

This in turn can be piped directly into pdf2ps.

How to convert a PDF into JPG with command line in Linux?

You can try ImageMagick's convert utility.

On Ubuntu, you can install it with this command:

$ sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Use convert like this:

$ convert input.pdf output.jpg
# For good quality use these parameters
$ convert -density 300 -quality 100 in.pdf out.jpg

Is there any wkhtmltopdf option to convert html text rather than file?

You can pipe content into wkhtmltopdf using the command line. For Windows, try this:

echo "<h3>blep</h3>" | wkhtmltopdf.exe - test.pdf

This reads like "echo <h3>blep</h3>, output it's stdout (standard out stream) to wkhtmltopdf stdin (standard in stream)".

The dash - in the wkhtmltopdf command means that it takes it's input from stdin and not a file.

You could also echo HTML into a file, feed that file to wkhtmltopdf and delete that file inside a script.

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