% libreoffice --convert-to txt:Text feric.pdf
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From what I read, that should work, but nothing happens. No error msg, but no file either.
This won’t work. LO sees PDFs as graphic files. Consequently they open in Draw. Each page is a “slide” made of drawing objects (graphical shapes). Since text is now a collection of text boxes not related to each other, you completely lose the reading order.
To convert a PDF to plain text, open your favourite PDF reader, select text (probably page per page), copy it and paste it into a text editor.
You can paste into Writer but every line will be a paragraph and you’ll have to rebuild the paragraph structure. This is somewhat easier in a simple text editor (where usually a paragraph break is coded as a blank line).
Yeah, I’m finding that using pdftotext and then opening it in geany (plain text editor) lets me rewrap the lines. Nothing very clean about the process, various converters have lost this or that. Anyway I just need to grab some data. I’ll leave LO out of it.