pdfinfo(1)

pdfinfo1

Portable document format (pdf) document information extractor (version 3.03)

Usage

pdfinfo [options] [PDF-file]

Overview

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

If PDF-file is ´-', it reads the PDF file from stdin.

The ´Info' dictionary contains the following values:

title

subject

keywords

author

creator

producer

creation date

modification date

In addition, the following information is printed:

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 requested information. The 'Info' dictionary and related data listed above is not printed. At most one of these five options may be used.

Options

-f number

Specifies the first page to examine. If multiple pages are requested using the "-f" and "-l" options, the size of each requested page (and, optionally, the bounding boxes for each requested page) are printed. Otherwise, only page one is examined.

-l number

Specifies 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

Print the textual content along with the document structure of a Tagged-PDF file. Note that extracting text this way might be slow for big PDF files. (Implies -struct.)

-url

Print all URLs in the PDF. Only the URL types supported by Poppler are listed. Currently, this is limited to Annotations. Note: only URLs referenced by the PDF objects such as Link Annotations are listed. pdfinfo does not attempt to extract strings matching http://... from the text content.

-isodates

Prints dates in ISO-8601 format (including the time zone).

-rawdates

Prints the raw (undecoded) date strings, directly from the PDF file.

-dests

Print a list of all named destinations. If a page range is specified using "-f" and "-l", only destinations in the page range are listed.

-enc encoding-name

Sets the encoding to use for text output. This defaults to "UTF-8".

-listenc

Lits the available encodings

-opw password

Specify the owner password for the PDF file. Providing this will bypass all security restrictions.

-upw password

Specify the user password for the PDF file.

-v

Print copyright and version information.

-h

Print usage information. (-help and --help are equivalent.)

Exit status

The Xpdf tools use the following exit codes:

0

No error.

1

Error opening a PDF file.

2

Error opening an output file.

3

Error related to PDF permissions.

99

Other error.

Releases

14 releases since Debian 2.2 (Potato); the text changed 10 times.

  1. 2.2
  2. 3.0
  3. 3.1–4.0
  4. 5.0
  5. 6.0
  6. 7
  7. 8
  8. 9
  9. 10
  10. 11
  11. 12–Arch

-box since Debian 3.1 (Sarge); -custom since Debian 12 (Bookworm); -dests since Debian 10 (Buster); -isodates since Debian 9 (Stretch); -js since Debian 9 (Stretch); -listenc since Debian 6.0 (Squeeze); -meta since Debian 3.1 (Sarge); -rawdates since Debian 9 (Stretch); -struct since Debian 9 (Stretch); -struct-text since Debian 9 (Stretch); -url since Debian 12 (Bookworm); -v since Debian 3.0 (Woody).

Author

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

From poppler 26.10.0-2 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.