Bug 7334

Summary:	pdftotext stdin support
Product:	poppler	Reporter:	Dom Lachowicz <domlachowicz>
Component:	general	Assignee:	poppler-bugs <poppler-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	medium	CC:	jwbaker
Version:	unspecified	Keywords:	patch
Hardware:	x86 (IA32)
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:
Attachments:	patch to implement the requested feature

Description Dom Lachowicz 2006-06-26 09:38:38 UTC

It would be useful if pdftotext had a mode to accept text from stdin, as it
already can pipe its results to stdout. This is useful in gateways and frontends
that don't want to (or can't) use an temporary on-disk file. 

I'll attach a very small patch that does this.

Comment 1 Dom Lachowicz 2006-06-26 09:40:09 UTC

Created attachment 6051 [details] [review]
patch to implement the requested feature

Example usage:

pdftotext - - < foo.pdf > foo.txt

Comment 2 Albert Astals Cid 2006-08-04 15:48:18 UTC

fixed in cvs

Comment 3 jwbaker 2008-05-05 11:34:26 UTC

This seems to have regressed.  In poppler 0.8.2, the invocation pdftotext - - complains that "Error: Document base stream is not seekable".

Comment 4 jwbaker 2008-05-05 11:43:46 UTC

Not sure why this is marked as cairo backend.  Probably belongs in general.

Comment 5 Albert Astals Cid 2008-05-05 14:37:17 UTC

That's right, the base stream needs to be seekable or otherwise poppler does not work at all. 

On the other hand i just tried to do 
./utils/pdftotext - < ~/okularfiles/pdf/alumnes_normativa.pdf 
and it created a -.txt file containing the text contents of alumnes_normativa.pdf

I'm not sure what could cause that behaviour change. 

Which shell are you using?
I tried with GNU bash, version 3.2.33(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) and 
zsh 4.3.4 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu) and both worked

Comment 6 Albert Astals Cid 2010-05-27 11:58:31 UTC

Should be working in the latests 0.13.x releases

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