doc-convert

Extract text from PDFs, DOCX files, images (via OCR), and other document formats.
All tools are pre-installed in the OpenClaw gateway container.

Available Tools

Tool	Binary	Purpose
pdftotext	pdftotext (poppler-utils)	Extract text from PDF files
pdfinfo	pdfinfo (poppler-utils)	Get PDF metadata (page count, size, etc.)
pdfimages	pdfimages (poppler-utils)	Extract images from PDFs
pandoc	pandoc	Convert between formats (DOCX->text, HTML->md, etc.)
tesseract	tesseract	OCR - extract text from images
python3	python3	pdfplumber, PyPDF2, python-docx, Pillow, pytesseract
libreoffice	libreoffice	Convert DOCX/XLSX/PPTX to PDF
imagemagick	convert / identify	Image manipulation and format conversion

Quick Reference

PDF to text

pdftotext input.pdf -                    # stdout
pdftotext -layout input.pdf output.txt   # preserve layout
pdftotext -f 1 -l 5 input.pdf -         # pages 1-5 only

PDF metadata

pdfinfo input.pdf

DOCX to plain text

pandoc -f docx -t plain input.docx       # stdout
pandoc -f docx -t markdown input.docx    # as markdown

DOCX to PDF

libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf input.docx

Image OCR

tesseract image.png stdout               # extract text from image
tesseract image.png output -l eng pdf    # OCR to searchable PDF
tesseract image.png stdout -l chi_sim    # Chinese OCR

HTML to Markdown

pandoc -f html -t markdown input.html

Python (advanced extraction)

# PDF with tables
import pdfplumber
with pdfplumber.open("file.pdf") as pdf:
    for page in pdf.pages:
        print(page.extract_text())
        for table in page.extract_tables():
            print(table)

# DOCX
from docx import Document
doc = Document("file.docx")
for para in doc.paragraphs:
    print(para.text)

# Image OCR via Python
from PIL import Image
import pytesseract
text = pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open("image.png"))
print(text)

Supported Formats

Format	Read	Convert To
PDF	pdftotext, pdfplumber, PyPDF2	text, markdown, images
DOCX	pandoc, python-docx	text, markdown, PDF
HTML	pandoc	text, markdown, PDF
Images (PNG/JPG/TIFF/BMP)	tesseract (OCR)	text, searchable PDF
XLSX/PPTX	libreoffice	PDF, then text
RTF	pandoc	text, markdown
EPUB	pandoc	text, markdown
ODT	pandoc, libreoffice	text, PDF

Notes

• For scanned PDFs (images, not text), use tesseract or pdfplumber with image extraction.
• pdftotext is fastest for text-based PDFs. Use pdfplumber when you need table extraction.
• pandoc handles format conversion between most document types.
• Large files: use page ranges (pdftotext -f 1 -l 10) to avoid memory issues.
• OCR quality depends on image resolution; 300 DPI recommended.