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pdf-read

v1.0.0

Published

11 days ago

Agent-friendly CLI for PDF text extraction with OCR fallback

0High
0Medium
0Low

pdf ocr cli text-extraction agent

pdf-read

An agent-friendly, agent-first CLI for reading PDFs fast. Designed for programmatic consumption by AI agents with reliable OCR fallback.

Features

Native Extraction: Uses pdftotext for blazing fast text recovery from text-based PDFs.
OCR Fallback: Automatically triggers Tesseract OCR if text density is low (e.g., scanned documents).
Deep Mode: Force OCR extraction with --deep for 100% text recovery.
Agent-First Output: JSON by default, with rich metadata and semantic exit codes.
Page Selection: Supports complex ranges like 1-5, 8, 11-13.
Help-as-Data: --help-json for automated tool discovery.

Installation

npm install -g pdf-read

Requires poppler-utils (for pdftotext and pdftoppm).

Usage

Basic Extraction (JSON)

pdf-read read document.pdf

Plain Text Output

pdf-read read document.pdf --text

Specific Pages

pdf-read read document.pdf --pages 1,3-5

Force OCR (Deep Mode)

pdf-read read document.pdf --deep --verbose

Agent Discovery

pdf-read read --help-json

Exit Codes

0: Success
80: Invalid argument
91: File not found
92: Not a PDF file
93: No text extracted
106: OCR failed
110: Internal error

License

MIT