Man page 1 : ps2ascii

ps2ascii - Ghostscript translator from PostScript or PDF to ASCII

ps2ascii [ input.ps [ output.txt ] ]
ps2ascii input.pdf [ output.txt ]

ps2ascii uses gs(1) to extract ASCII text from PostScript(tm) or Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files. If no files are specified on the command line, gs reads from standard input; but PDF input must come from an explicitly-named file, not standard input. If no output file is specified, the ASCII text is written to standard output.

ps2ascii doesn't look at font encoding, and isn't very good at dealing with kerning, so for PostScript (but not currently PDF), you might consider pstotext (see below).

Run "gs -h" to find the location of Ghostscript documentation on your system, from which you can get more details.

pstotext(1), http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/virtualpaper/pstotext.html

This document was last revised for Ghostscript version 8.71.

Artifex Software, Inc. are the primary maintainers of Ghostscript. David M. Jones <> made substantial improvements to ps2ascii.