pdfinfo(1)

🎀 pdfinfo(1) 🎀 General Commands Manual

✨ NAME ✨

okay so pdfinfo is the Portable Document Format (PDF) document information extractor (version 3.03) 💖 it's literally how you dig out info from a PDF 💅

🧚 SYNOPSIS 🧚

pdfinfo [options] [PDF-file]

📖 DESCRIPTION 📖

Pdfinfo prints the contents of the 'Info' dictionary (plus some other useful info) from a Portable Document Format (PDF) file 🦋

If PDF-file is -, it reads the PDF file from stdin 🫶

The 'Info' dictionary holds these values:

• title
• subject
• keywords
• author
• creator
• producer
• creation date
• modification date

On top of that, it also prints:

• custom metadata (yes/no)
• metadata stream (yes/no)
• tagged (yes/no)
• userproperties (yes/no)
• suspects (yes/no)
• form (AcroForm / XFA / none)
• javascript (yes/no)
• page count
• encrypted flag (yes/no)
• print and copy permissions (if encrypted)
• page size
• file size
• linearized (yes/no)
• PDF version
• metadata (only if requested)

⚠️ The options -listenc, -meta, -js, -struct, and -struct-text only print the one thing you asked for. The 'Info' dictionary and related data above will NOT show up. You can use at most one of these five options at a time 🙈

🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

• -f number — picks the first page to examine 💅 If you ask for a range with -f and -l, it prints the size of each page you asked for (and optionally the bounding boxes for each one). Otherwise, only page one gets checked.
• -l number — picks the last page to examine ✨
• -box — prints the page box bounding boxes: MediaBox, CropBox, BleedBox, TrimBox, and ArtBox 📦
• -meta — prints document-level metadata. This is the "Metadata" stream from the PDF file's Catalog object 🌈
• -custom — prints custom and standard metadata 💜
• -js — prints all JavaScript in the PDF 🔥
• -struct — prints the logical document structure of a Tagged-PDF file 🎀
• -struct-text — prints the textual content along with the document structure of a Tagged-PDF file. Heads up, extracting text this way might be slow for big PDF files 🐢 (Implies -struct.)
• -url — prints all URLs in the PDF 🦋 Only the URL types supported by Poppler get listed, and right now that's limited to Annotations. Also, it only catches URLs referenced by PDF objects like Link Annotations. pdfinfo does NOT go hunting for strings that look like http://... in the text content, so don't expect that 🙅‍♀️
• -isodates — prints dates in ISO-8601 format (including the time zone) 🗓️
• -rawdates — prints the raw, undecoded date strings, straight from the PDF file 🧃
• -dests — prints a list of all named destinations. If you set a page range with -f and -l, only the destinations in that range show up 📍
• -enc encoding-name — sets the encoding used for text output. It defaults to "UTF-8" 🍓
• -listenc — lists the available encodings 📜
• -opw password — gives the owner password for the PDF file.

🔐 Providing this bypasses ALL security restrictions, so use it wisely, bestie.

• -upw password — gives the user password for the PDF file 🔑
• -v — prints copyright and version info 🌟
• -h — prints usage info. (-help and --help are the same thing 💖)

🚦 EXIT CODES 🚦

The Xpdf tools use these exit codes:

• 0 — no error, we slay 👑
• 1 — error opening a PDF file 🙈
• 2 — error opening an output file 📁
• 3 — error related to PDF permissions 🔒
• 99 — some other error 💀

💌 AUTHOR 💌

The pdfinfo software and documentation are copyright 1996-2011 Glyph & Cog, LLC 🫶

🔗 SEE ALSO 🔗

pdfdetach(1), pdffonts(1), pdfimages(1), pdftocairo(1), pdftohtml(1), pdftoppm(1), pdftops(1), pdftotext(1), pdfseparate(1), pdfsig(1), pdfunite(1) 🦋

Okay bestie, that's the whole pdfinfo(1) tea ☕ It was last updated 15 August 2011, and it's pdfinfo(1) forever 💖✨