Case 02123

Document Handler

Extract text, metadata, and content from any document format.

Supported Formats

Quick Commands

PDF

# Extract text
pdftotext -layout input.pdf output.txt

# Get metadata
pdfinfo input.pdf

# Convert to images (for OCR or viewing)
pdftoppm -png input.pdf output_prefix

# Extract specific pages
pdftotext -f 5 -l 10 -layout input.pdf output.txt

DOCX/XLSX/PPTX (Office Open XML)

# Extract text from DOCX
unzip -p input.docx word/document.xml | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | tr -s ' \n'

# Extract text from XLSX (all sheets)
unzip -p input.xlsx xl/sharedStrings.xml | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | tr -s '\n'

# Extract text from PPTX
unzip -p input.pptx ppt/slides/*.xml | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | tr -s ' \n'

# Get metadata
unzip -p input.docx docProps/core.xml

RTF (macOS)

# Convert RTF to plain text
textutil -convert txt input.rtf -output output.txt

# Convert RTF to HTML
textutil -convert html input.rtf -output output.html

EPUB

# Extract and read EPUB content
unzip -l input.epub                    # List contents
unzip -p input.epub "*.html" | lynx -stdin -dump  # Text via lynx
unzip -p input.epub "*.xhtml" | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g'  # Raw text

OpenDocument (ODT/ODS/ODP)

# Extract text from ODT
unzip -p input.odt content.xml | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | tr -s ' \n'

# Extract from ODS
unzip -p input.ods content.xml | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g'

# Get metadata
unzip -p input.odt meta.xml

Scripts

extract_document.sh

Extracts text and metadata from any supported document format.

~/Dropbox/jarvis/skills/document-handler/scripts/extract_document.sh <file>

Output:

• Text content to stdout
• Metadata as JSON comments

pdf_to_images.sh

Converts PDF pages to images for OCR or visual processing.

~/Dropbox/jarvis/skills/document-handler/scripts/pdf_to_images.sh <pdf> <output_dir> [dpi]

Workflow

1. Identify format — Check file extension
2. Extract text — Use appropriate tool
3. Get metadata — Author, date, pages, etc.
4. Process content — Summarize, search, transform

Notes

• PDFs with scanned images need OCR (pdftoppm + tesseract)
• Encrypted PDFs require password
• Complex formatting may be lost in text extraction
• For tables in PDFs, consider tabula or camelot