Install Poppler Utilities on Ubuntu 24.04

Poppler is a widely used PDF rendering library. It also provides a collection of utilities to work with PDF files via command line. These tools allow you to extract text, convert PDFs to other formats, merge documents, and inspect metadata. This tutorial explains how to install Poppler utilities on Ubuntu 24.04.

Install Poppler utilities

Run the following command to update package lists:

sudo apt update

Now install the Poppler utilities package:

sudo apt install -y poppler-utils

You can confirm that the tools are available by checking their versions:

pdfinfo -v

pdftohtml -v

pdfunite -v

Testing Poppler utilities

Download a sample PDF file:

wget -qO test.pdf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/py-pdf/sample-files/master/003-pdflatex-image/pdflatex-image.pdf

Now run pdfinfo on the file to inspect its metadata:

pdfinfo test.pdf

Example output:

Creator:         TeX
Producer:        pdfTeX-1.40.23
CreationDate:    Sun Apr  3 17:47:32 2022 UTC
ModDate:         Sun Apr  3 17:47:32 2022 UTC
Custom Metadata: yes
Metadata Stream: no
Tagged:          no
UserProperties:  no
Suspects:        no
Form:            none
JavaScript:      no
Pages:           1
Encrypted:       no
Page size:       595.276 x 841.89 pts (A4)
Page rot:        0
File size:       74061 bytes
Optimized:       no
PDF version:     1.5

Uninstall Poppler utilities

If you no longer need the Poppler utilities, you can uninstall them along with any unused dependencies:

sudo apt purge --autoremove -y poppler-utils