Alternatives to pdf2htmlEX
A command-line converter that turns PDF files into HTML while keeping text and layout. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
pdf2htmlEX
A command-line converter that turns PDF files into HTML while keeping text and layout.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as pdf2htmlEX.
Xpdf
A PDF viewer plus command-line tools for extracting text and images and converting PDFs to HTML.
Xpdf includes command-line tools for converting PDFs to HTML and extracting text and images, plus a lightweight viewer, though not every component is open source.
Marker
An open-source tool that converts PDFs and other documents to Markdown, JSON and HTML.
Marker converts PDFs to HTML, Markdown and JSON with tables and equations, but outputs clean structure rather than a visual copy of the layout.
MinerU
A document parser that converts PDFs, Office files and scans into Markdown and JSON.
MinerU parses PDFs and scans into Markdown and JSON for pipelines, with OCR support, rather than producing layout-faithful HTML pages.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Poppler
PDF rendering library with pdftotext, pdftoppm and pdfinfo tools.
MarkItDown
Python command-line tool that converts PDFs, Office files and other documents into Markdown.
MuPDF
Compact, very fast PDF and XPS viewer with a command-line toolkit.
mutool (MuPDF)
Command-line companion to MuPDF for PDF extraction, cleaning and merging.
PaddleOCR
OCR toolkit that turns PDFs and images into structured data.
Ghostscript
PostScript and PDF interpreter behind a great deal of other software.
