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← README · see also: Content extraction

PDF support (optional)

If pdftotext (poppler) is on $PATH, webfetch will accept application/pdf responses and return the extracted plain text. Useful for academic papers, RFCs served as PDF, datasheets, vendor manuals, government docs — the things you'd otherwise have to download and paste excerpts from.

Install:

brew install poppler         # macOS
# apt install poppler-utils  # Debian/Ubuntu
# dnf install poppler-utils  # Fedora

Detected once per process and cached. webfetch invokes pdftotext -layout -enc UTF-8 - - on the response bytes; -layout preserves two-column papers and tables, which the default reading-order mode mangles. Output is plain text — no markdown wrapping, no fences (PDFs aren't structured for markdown rendering; pretending they are produces worse output than pdftotext -layout).

No pdftotext present? PDFs are rejected with the existing "Cannot fetch application/pdf" error — byte-for-byte the same behavior as before. A one-shot warning is written to stderr on the first PDF fetch so you know what you're missing; it is never added to tool output.

Caveats

  • Scanned / image-only PDFs return empty or near-empty text. OCR (e.g. tesseract) is a much heavier dependency and a separate decision; out of scope.
  • No DOCX, EPUB, RTF, ODT. Each is a separate optional binary with its own quirks. Open an issue if you need one.
  • No PDF form / annotation extraction.
  • 5 MB response cap still applies. A 50 MB PDF will be rejected before pdftotext ever runs.