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How to extract text from a PDF (without copying and pasting by hand)

You've got several PDFs (invoices, reports, contracts) and what you actually need isn't the file itself, it's the text inside it: to search for a word, analyze it, drop it into a spreadsheet, or hand it off to another tool. Copying and pasting page by page doesn't scale past a couple of files.

It comes up a lot in cases like:

• Supplier invoices where you need the amount or invoice number in a spreadsheet.
• Contracts or reports where you're looking for a specific clause or figure without opening each one.
• PDFs you want to run through a translator, a summarizer, or any other tool that only understands plain text.
• Files that run hundreds of pages, where searching by hand just isn't realistic.

Extract text from a PDF does exactly that: you send it the PDF, it sends back the text.

How it works

You send the raw PDF (application/pdf) or a JSON body with { file, pages }. The response is always JSON (never a PDF, since what you're asking for is text, not a file) with { text, num_pages, info, pages? }: the full text, the page count, and some info about the document.

If you need the text page by page

By default (pages: false) you only get the full text, all joined together in text. Set pages: true and you also get a pages array with each page's text kept separate. Useful when it's not enough to know a phrase is somewhere in the document; you need to know exactly which page.

When the text comes back empty, that's not an error

This is the case that trips people up the most: if the PDF is a scan (an image sitting inside a PDF, with no real text layer behind it), the response comes back with text: "" (empty) but success: true, and it still uses 1 credit. Nothing failed: that PDF genuinely has no text to extract, just a picture of a page. Getting text out of it would require OCR, which this tool doesn't do.

If you run into this, the quickest check is whether you can select text with your mouse when you open the PDF in a browser. If you can't, it's a scan, and the empty result is correct, not a bug.

FAQ

Why does it return empty text when the PDF opens perfectly fine? Because "opens fine" and "has real text" are two different things. A PDF can be nothing more than a scanned image sitting inside a PDF file: it looks perfect, but there isn't a single character of real text in it, so there's nothing to extract without OCR.

Can I find out which page a specific phrase is on? Yes, by requesting pages: true. Alongside the full text in text, you get a pages array with each page's content kept separate.

How much does each extraction cost? 1 credit per call, regardless of how much text the PDF actually has (even if it comes back empty because it's a scan).

Try these tools

You'll find the full instructions for Extract text from a PDF, covering both output modes. And if you don't have an account yet, you can create one for free.