Xpdf - PDFtoHTML - Command Line Utility to Convert a PDF File to HTML

1. Download the software

You may have already downloaded the Xpdf tools while watching one of my earlier videos in the series, but there has since been an upgrade from Version 3 to Version 4 and there is a new download site:

https://www.xpdfreader.com/download.html

Visit that site and download the pre-compiled Windows binary ZIP archive, then unzip it.

2. Locate the documentation folder for the Xpdf utilities

Go to the folder where you unzipped the downloaded ZIP file and find the doc folder.

3. Read the documentation for the PDFtoHTML tool

Go into the doc folder and find the pdftohtml.txt file.

It is a plain text file. Open it with any text editor, such as Notepad, and read it. This is the documentation for the PDFtoHTML tool.

4. Set up a test folder

Create a test folder.

Copy pdftohtml.exe from the unzipped bin32 folder into your test folder.

Copy a sample PDF file into your test folder, preferably one with numerous pages.

5. Set up a command prompt for testing

Open a command prompt window.

Navigate to your test folder.

Issue a DIR command in the command prompt to be sure that only two files are in it - the PDFtoHTML executable and the sample PDF file.

6. Run the PDFtoHTML utility

Issue the following command in the command prompt:

pdftohtml TestFileName.pdf HTMLfolder

If you receive the following error messages, ignore them:
Config Error: No display font for 'Symbol'
Config Error: No display font for 'ZapfDingbats'

Issue a DIR command and verify that the HTML folder was created.

7. Test the created HTML

Use Windows/File Explorer (or whatever file manager you prefer) to go into the created HTML folder.

Open the index.html file.

Look at the HTML pages and verify that the conversion worked correctly.


That's it! If you find this video to be helpful, please click the thumbs-up icon above. Thank you for watching!