![]() ![]() These API solutions include the following: In the demonstration portion of this article, I’ll walk you through two simple and easy-to-use API solutions that are designed to extract plain text from regular PDF documents without having to open or make any changes to the original file. That’s because PDF editing APIs can communicate with the compressed PDF file without ever having to open it they can make meaningful edits (such as rotating pages, removing comments, etc.) and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, they can extract targeted content without having any impact on the original document at all. To edit and process PDFs at scale, third-party API services represent the most efficient solution. These solutions, while effective on a file-by-file basis, aren’t great for achieving results at scale, however - they still require manual navigation through an interface, which takes up time most people don’t have to waste on high-volume conversion tasks. Further, you’re asking for that text - which can contain a lot of complex formatting encoded from a proprietary application like Microsoft Word - to be normalized in a way that anyone on any platform can read it.īecause of the relative difficulty associated with performing simple editing tasks on a PDF, it’s common practice to use third-party PDF editors (or premium Adobe tools) to achieve the desired results. When you attempt to get plain text from a regular PDF document, what you’re really trying to do is isolate one specific piece of a PDF’s many possible content types and only retain the text content from it. If you’ve tried to extract text from a scanned or rasterized PDF (one that is entirely made up of two-dimensional images with pixels) using those same tools, you’ve probably noticed that it isn’t possible at all - at least, not without a specialized Optical Character Recognition (OCR) service a very separate, albeit equally important solution to the PDF-to-text problem. ![]() When you just wanted the plain text portion, that clutter is a big distraction, and you’re still left with the task of separating text from the new document and manually normalizing that anyway. If you’ve ever attempted to extract text by - for example - hastily converting a PDF to an office document format (perhaps using one of the hundreds of free PDF conversion tools available online), especially without knowing what the original document format was, you’ve likely experienced a huge amount of formatting inconsistencies, strange spacing issues, missing links or media files, and random lines or tables floating around where they shouldn’t be. So, what if you just want to extract plain, unformatted text from a PDF - and nothing more special than that? There are many reasons why getting pure text is useful, but extracting it in a convenient, scalable way isn’t as simple as it may seem. It doesn’t help that they are designed and programmed to be difficult to edit in the first place it’s part of what makes PDFs a secure and reliable format in the first place. Because PDFs handle so many different content types in one file, they go through extensive compression to achieve an easily portable size, which means opening a PDF document and changing its contents is never a straightforward task. In fact, almost everything that makes PDFs such an ideal solution for reformatting externally/manually generated material conversely makes them one of the more challenging formats to manipulate. If there is one major drawback to PDF documents, it is that they are notoriously difficult to edit. ![]() The list of *insert document* to PDF conveniences goes on and on. Formats like Microsoft Word DOCX simply can’t be opened as intended on many operating systems the PDF version easily retains the same fonts and formatting edits included in the original, allowing the end viewer to see an exact visual representation of the document as it was intended. File types like PowerPoint’s PPTX, for example, are often so large that exporting the file as a PDF is the only efficient way to make the project shareable PDF’s vector and raster graphics capabilities offer an ideal solution, maintaining a perfect representation of the original document while achieving much better compression for sharing. Capable of holding an impressive variety of content/object types and working seamlessly on any operating system you can think of, PDFs dominate personal and professional project landscapes as a destination format for bulky and/or specially formatted files. There is perhaps no file type more ubiquitous (by design) than the Portable Document Format (PDF).
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