50 tools
Cross-platform word processor whose CLI conversion mode (`abiword --to=txt`) doubles as a lightweight PDF text-extraction tool: imports a PDF's text content and exports it to plain text, HTML, ODT, DOCX, and other formats supported by its plugin system. Originally built as a free, cross-platform alternative to Microsoft Word, with PDF import/export handled through its own document-filter architecture rather than a dedicated PDF engine. Well-suited for batch format conversion where PDF is one of several formats needed.
Django web app (arxiv-vanity.com) that renders arXiv papers as responsive, mobile-friendly HTML web pages instead of PDF, using the companion Engrafo LaTeX-to-HTML converter to do the actual conversion; includes an arXiv scraping command and an admin interface.
E-book library management application built around organizing, converting, and reading large personal e-book collections; its bundled `ebook-convert` CLI happens to double as a capable PDF-to-plain-text (and PDF-to-other-e-book-format) converter, alongside dozens of other supported formats. Not a PDF-specific tool — PDF is just one of many formats its conversion pipeline handles — but a genuinely useful one when PDF-to-text conversion is needed as part of a broader e-book workflow.
Open-source virtual (network) printer for Windows that turns any application's Print dialog into a PDF-generation pipeline. Outputs PDF/A-1b/2b/3b, PDF/X, PDF/Image, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and plain text; runs OCR on the printed content; and password-protects output with up to 256-bit AES encryption. Built with multi-user and enterprise deployment scenarios in mind, including centrally managed print-queue configurations across a network.
Cog/Replicate-deployable packaging of Marker (see the separate Marker entry), converting PDFs — and EPUB, MOBI, XPS, FB2 — to Markdown via layout analysis and OCR, with table formatting and LaTeX-equation conversion carried over from the underlying Marker engine. Exists as its own entry because it's a distinct deployable artifact (a Cog container image runnable on Replicate's infrastructure) rather than a different tool — the actual conversion logic is Marker's.
Go library, CLI, and HTTP service that converts PDF, DOC, DOCX, XML, HTML, RTF, ODT, Pages, and image files to plain text plus metadata (as JSON), aiming to be a single conversion entry point across many document formats rather than a PDF-specific tool. Optional OCR support (via Tesseract, enabled with the `ocr` build tag) handles image-based input. Its multi-format scope suits ingestion pipelines that need to normalize mixed document types into plain text.
Document-conversion toolkit that parses PDFs (and Office/image formats) into a unified structured representation, with layout analysis, OCR (EasyOCR by default), table structure recognition, and optional vision-language-model image description; exports to Markdown, HTML, or JSON.
JavaStandalone CLI tool and embeddable Java library that converts DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, and ODT files to PDF without requiring a LibreOffice or Microsoft Office installation as a dependency — useful in server environments where installing a full office suite isn't practical. PPT/PPTX slides are converted to PDFs with each slide embedded as a rendered PNG image rather than reconstructed as native PDF content, preserving visual fidelity at the cost of the text no longer being selectable.
Open-source reporting and data-visualization project under the Eclipse Foundation, built around three cooperating pieces: a report design/engine/model for generating reports from arbitrary data sources, a charting module for standalone or embedded graphical visualizations, and a web viewer component for delivering interactive reports in a browser. Reports can be exported to PDF among other output formats. Widely used as the reporting layer embedded inside larger enterprise Java applications.
CPostScript and PDF interpreter/renderer from Artifex — the reference engine that many other PDF tools build on or shell out to under the hood. Converts PostScript and PDF to raster images, plain text, DOCX, PCL, and XPS; compresses PDFs while preserving visual quality; converts to and validates against the PDF/A archival standard; and adds a searchable OCR text layer to scanned pages. Also handles imposition (N-up page layout), ICC color management, and ZUGFeRD/Factur-X e-invoicing embedding.
Android PDF toolkit centered on creating PDFs from camera or gallery images (plus converting plain text files to PDF), alongside managing existing PDFs: merge, split, compress, remove/rearrange/rotate pages, extract images, and encrypt/decrypt. Aimed at the common mobile use case of turning photographed documents or receipts into a shareable PDF, with the page-management tools included as a secondary, more general-purpose capability.
JavaJava reporting engine that compiles XML report templates (.jrxml) into executable reports (.jasper), pulling data from any data source to produce pixel-perfect documents; exports to PDF, HTML, Excel, Word, and OpenOffice formats, and renders Pie/Bar/Stacked Bar charts. Designed with Jaspersoft Studio and embeddable via API.
JavaScriptOpen-source report-rendering platform: design reports with templating engines (e.g. Handlebars) or a visual designer, and render them to PDF, HTML, Excel, DOCX, and other formats; includes user management, a REST API, scheduling, and email delivery. Usable standalone or embedded as a Node.js library.
RubyRuby framework that converts Markdown (with ERB templating) into PDF (via Prince XML), EPUB, Mobi, and HTML e-books: auto-generated tables of contents from headings, Rouge syntax highlighting, custom @font-face fonts, book-layout stylesheets per format, frontmatter metadata/variables, and pre/post-render content hooks.
Document viewer built for e-ink readers: fixed-layout (PDF, DjVu, CBT, CBZ) and reflowable (EPUB, FB2, Mobi, DOC, RTF, HTML, CHM, TXT) formats; reflows scanned PDFs via K2pdfopt; customizable typography (margins, line spacing, fonts); StarDict dictionary and Wikipedia lookups; Calibre/Wallabag/Google Translate integration; and built-in FTP client, SSH server, and OPDS catalog support.
C++Full office suite (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw) that doubles as a batch PDF-conversion tool via its headless CLI mode (`--headless --convert-to`): imports PDF content through the `writer_pdf_import` filter and exports it to plain text, ODF, and dozens of other document formats it already supports natively. Since it's a general office suite rather than a PDF-specific tool, conversion fidelity depends on how cleanly a given PDF's layout maps back onto Writer's own document model.
CLI/Docker tool that converts a Markdown resume into a responsive HTML5/CSS3 page and a matching PDF (rendered via wkhtmltopdf), with selectable visual themes and a live-reload watch mode for editing. Also generates word-frequency stats analysis of the resume content, a distinctive extra not found in most other Markdown-to-resume tools in this directory. Outputs a single self-contained HTML file with embedded styles alongside the PDF.
CLI tool (`md2resume`) that converts a Markdown resume into both a responsive HTML page and a PDF version, rendering the PDF via wkhtmltopdf under the hood. Includes a watch mode for live-reload editing while writing the resume, plus Docker support for running it without a local wkhtmltopdf install. One of several Markdown-to-resume tools in this directory (see also Kitabu, Gimli) built around the same 'write once, get HTML and PDF' workflow.
Converts PDFs, images, PPTX, DOCX, XLSX, HTML, and EPUB to Markdown, JSON, HTML, or chunks, preserving reading order: reconstructs tables (heuristics with VLM fallback for complex cases), recognizes math/equations as LaTeX, extracts and saves images, performs multilingual OCR via the Surya VLM, strips headers/footers/artifacts, and can optionally use an LLM to improve accuracy.
PythonConverts PDFs, Office documents, images, audio, HTML, and other formats to Markdown for use as LLM input; ships both a CLI and a Python library, and can keep embedded images as base64 data URIs instead of discarding them.
Converts PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, images, and web pages into Markdown or JSON: strips headers/footers/page numbers while preserving structure, converts formulas to LaTeX and tables to HTML, OCRs scanned/garbled PDFs in 109 languages, handles single/multi-column and complex layouts (incl. cross-page table merging), and extracts images with captions. Offers CLI, FastAPI, and Gradio WebUI, plus Python/Go/TypeScript SDKs; builds on PDF-Extract-Kit's models.
CLightweight, fast C library, desktop viewer, and CLI toolset for PDF, XPS, and e-book formats, built by Artifex around the same rendering core used in Ghostscript. Renders pages and extracts text/images/metadata/structured content; creates, splits, merges, and compresses PDFs; adds annotations (highlights, stamps, shapes); permanently redacts content; and digitally signs documents. Converts between PDF, SVG, PNG, HTML, and PostScript, and embeds into web pages and native apps via its library bindings.
Neural OCR model (Meta/Facebook Research) that parses academic PDF papers into Markdown (.mmd), understanding LaTeX math and tables; supports single or batch PDF processing, page-range selection, and failure-detection heuristics for problematic pages.
HaskellUniversal document converter between Markdown, HTML, LaTeX/ConTeXt, DOCX/RTF/ODT, EPUB, man/ms roff, DocBook, JATS, TEI, Jupyter notebooks, PowerPoint/reveal.js/Beamer slides, and dozens more formats. Uses external PDF-producing engines (context, latexmk, lualatex, pdflatex, xelatex, wkhtmltopdf, weasyprint, prince, pagedjs-cli, tectonic, pdfroff) to convert into PDF, and preserves metadata, footnotes, tables, math, syntax highlighting, and citations/bibliographies (via CSL) across formats.
PythonConverts scanned-book PDFs to Markdown or EPUB using OCR (DeepSeek OCR locally, or DeepSeek/Baidu vendor backends), recognizing complex structure including tables and formulas; extracts body text while filtering headers/footers, preserves footnotes/images/assets, auto-generates an EPUB table of contents (optionally LLM-enhanced), and offers configurable table (HTML/image) and formula (MathML/SVG/image) rendering. Runs fully offline as of v1.0.0.
PythonConverts PDF files to DOCX (Word) format, preserving formatting and layout — fonts, positioning, images — rather than dumping plain text into a Word document, and extracts tables as genuine Word tables rather than flattened text. Offers both a CLI and a GUI, covering scripted batch conversion and one-off interactive use. A common need for taking a PDF that needs further editing back into an editable Word document.
C++Converts PDF to HTML while preserving text/layout fidelity (native positioned text with original fonts), producing a single self-contained file or a paged on-demand-loading version; carries over hyperlinks, outlines/bookmarks, SVG backgrounds, Type 3 and CJK fonts, and print support. Built on Poppler and FontForge; this pdf2htmlEX/pdf2htmlEX fork continues the original coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX as an open community effort.
C#Source code of the well-known PDFCreator from pdfforge, a free virtual-printer application: install it once and any application's own Print dialog can output directly to PDF. Supports merging and reordering pages, password and digital-signature protection, PDF/A archival compliance, custom cover pages, and automated post-processing actions (FTP upload, email delivery, custom scripting) triggered on every conversion. Widely used as a default 'print to PDF' tool on Windows.
PythonPure-Python CLI (companion to pypdf) with commands including 2-up/booklet page layout, cat (extract/merge pages), check-sign (verify signatures), compress/uncompress, extract-annotated-pages, extract-images, extract-links, extract-text, meta/pagemeta, rm (delete pages), rotate, sign, update-offsets (repair simple PDFs), and x2pdf (convert other formats to PDF pages).
Translates scientific PDF documents while preserving layout, formulas, charts, tables of contents, and annotations; supports Google Translate, DeepL, Ollama, OpenAI, and other translation backends via CLI, GUI, Docker, or a Zotero plugin, with batch/directory translation and partial-document translation.
PythonCLI that converts a PDF to Markdown, built as a thin wrapper around PyMuPDF4LLM — the actual conversion logic lives in PyMuPDF4LLM, with pdfmd providing a simple, single-command CLI entry point over it rather than requiring a Python script. A lightweight choice for command-line/shell-script workflows that just need 'PDF in, Markdown out' without writing any Python code.
Original PDFMiner: text extraction with location, font, and size data, layout analysis for reconstructing reading order from a page's raw content stream, format conversion to HTML/XML, table-of-contents/outline extraction, RC4/AES decryption, and multi-font/CJK text support. Python 2-only and unmaintained since its author moved on; fully superseded by the community-maintained Pdfminer.six fork, which carries the same core engine forward with Python 3 support and active development.
Pure-Python PDF-1.7 parser/extraction library: text, images, HTML, or hOCR output with exact text location/font/color data; AcroForm and tagged-content extraction; outline/TOC extraction; embedded image extraction (JPG, PNG, TIFF, JBIG2, bitmaps); CJK and vertical-writing support; Type1/TrueType/Type3/CID fonts; RC4/AES decryption; and decoding of ASCIIHex/ASCII85/LZW/Flate/RunLength/CCITTFax compression filters.
PDF toolkit built around a Rust engine, exposed as native bindings for ~20 languages (Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, C#/.NET, Java, and more), a CLI, and an MCP server for AI-assistant integration: text/character-level and image extraction, form-field reading and filling, Markdown/HTML conversion with heading detection, PDF creation and editing, watermarking, merging/splitting, regex-based search, and metadata access.
Standalone PDF-to-HTML/XML converter built on Xpdf 2.02's parsing code, producing an HTML or XML rendering of a PDF's text and layout — not to be confused with the same-named `pdftohtml` binary bundled with Poppler, a separate, newer implementation that superseded this project. Distributed only as source and Windows binaries via its old SourceForge project page, with no activity since Xpdf 2.02's era.
Data-extraction application that converts PDF files into XML, built on an old snapshot of the JPedal library rather than being independently maintained. An abandoned, CVS/SourceForge-era project with no development activity since — kept here for completeness rather than as a recommended active tool, since Poppler's own `pdftohtml -xml` and similar actively-maintained tools now cover the same ground more reliably.
Generates PDFs two ways from the same package: DOCX templating (variable substitution like `${FOO}`, block cloning, table row duplication, then converted to PDF) for template-driven document generation, or direct HTML-to-PDF conversion via PhantomJS for cases where a DOCX template isn't the right fit. The DOCX-templating path is the more distinctive of the two, letting non-developers design the template layout directly in Word.
Converts XML (or Markdown) documents to PDF or images (JPEG/PNG via GD/Imagick/Gmagick) with HTML-like tags (div, p, table, headings, lists, images, links); supports auto-breakable/fixed pages, multi-column layouts, headers/footers/watermarks, page numbering, metadata, internal/external links, bookmarks, sticky notes, barcodes (via Zend), simple pie charts, borders, backgrounds, rotation/transparency, and stylesheets; usable via web or CLI, with Symfony2 integration.
Writes and reads OOXML (Word 2007+), ODF (ODT), RTF, HTML, and PDF documents: sections with headers/footers/page numbering, styled text runs and paragraphs, tables, images (local/remote/watermark), drawing shapes, charts (pie/bar/line/area/scatter/radar), OLE objects, TOCs, footnotes/endnotes, form fields, lists, template-based generation, and XSL transforms.
C++PDF rendering library and command-line suite — a fork of Xpdf that's become the de facto standard PDF engine underlying much of the open-source PDF ecosystem, powering tools like Evince, Okular, and countless downstream wrappers. Ships pdftotext, pdfimages, pdftoppm, pdftocairo, pdftohtml, pdftops, pdfinfo, pdffonts, pdfdetach, pdfattach, pdfseparate, pdfunite, and pdfsig, covering text/image extraction, page rendering, format conversion, metadata, attachments, and signature verification.
Markdown-conversion layer built on PyMuPDF: converts PDF pages to Markdown while preserving headings, tables (ruled-line or text-position-based detection), and images, specifically tuned for feeding PDF content to LLMs as clean, structured Markdown rather than raw extracted text. A sibling package to base PyMuPDF rather than a separate engine — it reuses PyMuPDF's own C-level parsing and adds the Markdown-shaping layer on top.
Converts PDF text to XML, built on pdfminer rather than a from-scratch parser; created as an alternative to Poppler's `pdftoxml` specifically because of better handling of CID Type2 font decoding that the Poppler tool got wrong on certain PDFs. Ships three separate CLI utilities — `pdf2xml`, `pdfxml2csv`, and `headerfilter` — covering the conversion itself plus two post-processing steps for turning the XML output into cleaner tabular data.
Ghostscript-based document API that generates documents programmatically and converts between PDF, PS, GIF, TIF, PNG, and JPG, wrapping Ghostscript's own command-line interface behind a Ruby-friendly API rather than reimplementing format conversion. Supports EPS templates for merging generated content with pre-designed layouts, plus optimizations for handling large documents without loading everything into memory at once.
Runs a precompiled LibreOffice binary inside AWS Lambda to convert documents to PDF (and between other office formats) at low cost, with Terraform examples, a Node.js Lambda handler (with S3 integration), and a Docker setup for compiling LibreOffice yourself.
Self-hostable PDF toolkit with 50+ tools: edit, merge, split, sign, redact, and convert PDFs; OCR scanned pages; compress files; validate signatures; apply watermarks; and automate workflows via no-code pipelines, a REST API, and webhooks. Offered as a browser-based UI, desktop client, or self-hosted server (incl. air-gapped deployment).
JavaScriptJavaScript-only SVG-to-PDF conversion utility that runs in the browser, built on top of jsPDF for the actual PDF output. Parses and renders SVG path/shape elements as genuine vector PDF content rather than rasterizing to an image, so the result stays crisp at any zoom level. Being pure JavaScript with no native dependencies, it works entirely client-side with no server round-trip needed for the conversion.
JavaMerges DOCX/ODT template documents (authored normally in MS Word or OpenOffice/LibreOffice, with placeholder fields marked up directly in the document) with a Java data model to generate populated reports, then converts the result to PDF, XHTML, or back to the original office format. Ships an iText-based PDF converter alongside its own DOCX/ODT-native converters, so template authors can design reports visually rather than programmatically laying out PDF content.
C++PDF viewer plus a full command-line toolset (pdftotext, pdftops, pdftoppm, pdftopng, pdftohtml, pdfinfo, pdfimages, pdffonts, pdfdetach) for viewing PDFs and converting them to text, PostScript, image, or HTML, alongside metadata, image, font, and attachment extraction. The original codebase Poppler itself forked from; poppler-utils has since become the more actively maintained fork of these same tools, but Xpdf continues independent development under its original author.
JavaJava reporting library (developed by Haulmont for the CUBA Platform) that fills templates with data (loaded via SQL, Groovy, or other sources) and generates reports in Office formats (doc/docx/xls/xlsx), HTML, FreeMarker, CSV, or custom text — headless, with no built-in UI, for embedding into host applications.
JavaScriptOCR/document-ingestion library (Node/TypeScript and Python implementations) that converts PDFs, Word/Excel/PowerPoint files, and images to page images, then sends each to a vision-language model (OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Google Gemini, or Vertex AI) to produce Markdown, preserving tables/charts; supports structured JSON-schema extraction, page selection, concurrent processing, and orientation/edge correction.