As an extra bit of help, use the '-layout' option to give you a formatted text document that's laid out the same way as the original .pdf document: pdft

As an extra bit of help, use the '-layout' option to give you a formatted text document that's laid out the same way as the original .pdf document: pdftotext -layout my_file.pdf will produce 'my_file.txt', Note also that the .pdf must contain TEXT as such. An IMAGE of text will not work as expected with 'pdftotext'.