Points of Interests

The following is a list of common steps executed by pdftotext to extract text from a PDF file, and in which file the corresponding code is located. Note that the stated locations refer to commit 065dca3 and may have changed by now.

Opening and reading the PDF file
PDFDoc::PDFDoc(), line 144ff
Parsing the PDF version number from the PDF file header
PDFDoc::checkHeader(), line 350
Parsing startxref
PDFDoc::getStartXRef(), line 1999ff
Parsing the xref table and the trailer dictionary
XRef::readXRefTable(), line 535

HOWTOs

Create a PDF with human-readable objects + content streams

Put the following in the preamble of your TeX file (between \documentclass{} and \begin{document}):

   1 \pdfobjcompresslevel=0 
   2 \pdfcompresslevel=0

Create a PDF with specified crop box

Put the following in the preamble of your TeX file (between \documentclass{} and \begin{document}):

   1 \pdfpageattr{
   2   /CropBox [50 50 100 100]
   3 }

Create A PDF without page numbering

Put the following in the preamble of your TeX file:

   1 \thispagestyle{empty}