#17 Pure text support?

[Anonymous]

This program is the closest I've comed to a pure pdf to
text converter. If I could just get the program to skip
the HTML formatting it would be perfect. Maybe a -text
command line argument can be added in the future?

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

The xpdf package already comes with a command line utility
that does this: pdftotext

The beauty of pdftohtml/xml is that you get to keep all the
information about formatting and layout so that you have
more useful information.

[David A. Gatwood]

Logged In: YES
user_id=189212

I don't know about the person who filed this bug, but personally, I'd like
something halfway in-between the two.

What I'd like is fundamentally a converter that preserves the spirit of the
original flow rather than the letter of the original formatting.

* Paragraph coalescing. Each paragraph wrapped in a <p> tag. Formatting
changes marked up by wrapping individual words with <span> within it.

* Table coalescing. Tabular-looking data wrapped into an actual <table> tag
using a nearest-match algorithm.

* Bullet list coalescing. Symbol font 'm' is a bullet. If it starts a line and it is
indented more than the previous line, wrap it in <ul><li>.

* Numbered list coalescing. If it is indented farther than the previous line and
starts with a number, it's a list. Wrap it in <ol><li>.

* Term-and-definition coalescing. Hanging lists and similar coalesced into
term-and-definition lists. Wrap it in <dl><dt><dd>.

* Section heading detection. A bold-faced chunk of text with everything
under it indented is a section heading. Top level is <H1>, next nesting level
is <H2>, and so on.

With such a feature, it would be far more practical to use this to generate
intermediate HTML suitable for conversion into other, non-formatting-
oriented formats such as DocBook XML.

While it might be possible to implement such enhancements as a wrapper for
this tool as-is, it is certainly not trivial.... From the way you describe it, it
sounds like it might be easier to add some formatting to pdftotext than to try
to make this do what I want, but having never seen the output of pdftotext, I
could be wrong.