mutool show

The show command will print the specified objects and streams to stdout. Streams are decoded and non-printable characters are represented with a period by default.

mutool show [options] input.pdf ...

The options are:

-p password

Use the specified password if the file is encrypted.

-o output

The output file name instead of using stdout. Should be a plain text file format.

-e

Leave stream contents in their original form.

-b

Print only stream contents, as raw binary data.

-g

Print only object, one line per object, suitable for grep.

-r

Force repair before showing any objects.

-L

Show object labels (how to reach an object from the root)

input.pdf

Input file name. Must be a PDF file.

Specify what to show by using one of the following keywords, or a path to an object:

trailer

Print the trailer dictionary.

xref

Print the cross reference table.

pages

List the object numbers for every page.

grep

Print all the objects in the file in a compact one-line format suitable for piping to grep.

outline

Print the outline (also known as “table of contents” or “bookmarks”).

js

Print document level Javascript.

form

Print form objects.

a path

A path starts with either an object number, a property in the trailer dictionary, or the keyword “trailer” or “pages”. Separate elements with a period ‘.’ or slash ‘/’. Select a page object by using pages/N where N is the page number. The first page is number 1.

*

You can use * as a wildcard to iterate over all array indices or dictionary properties in an object.

Examples

Find the number of pages in a document:

mutool show input.pdf trailer/Root/Pages/Count

Print the content stream data of the first page:

mutool show -b input.pdf pages/1/Contents

Print the names of all the font resources on all the pages:

mutool show input.pdf pages/*/Resources/Font/*/BaseFont

Show all JPEG compressed stream objects:

mutool show input.pdf grep | grep '/Filter/DCTDecode'