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Poppler / pdftotext
Extract an inspectable text draft from PDFs with an existing text layer.
Tags: PDF, transcripts, command-line
For: Creators and editors receiving interview drafts as PDFs.
Not OCR; text order and meaningful output require checking.
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Tested utility: pdftotext 24.02.0, not the latest Poppler release.
pdftotext reads an existing text layer—it is not OCR. Scanned pages without selectable text will not magically become a transcript. Even with a text layer, reading order can jump across columns or headers, so open the draft and confirm the sequence before you treat it as an interview transcript.