PDF to Text — Extract Text from PDFs in Bulk

Extract plain text from PDF URLs in bulk: whole document or page by page, reading order kept, plus title, author, page count and dates. Paste a web page to convert every PDF it links to. $3 per 1,000 PDFs + $0.20 per 1,000 pages.

Extract text from PDFs in bulk. Paste links to PDF files (reports, papers, manuals, filings, invoices) or a web page that links to them, and get the plain text of every PDF back, as one document or page by page, in reading order (two-column papers included) with hyphenated line breaks joined. Each row also has the PDF's title, author, page count, creation and modification dates and word count. Need structure? Switch on Markdown output (headings and lists) or RAG chunks for embedding in the same run. Scanned PDFs without a text layer are flagged and never charged (use our PDF OCR actor for those). Use it to feed PDFs to LLMs, RAG pipelines and AI agents, build search indexes, check documents for keywords, or add a PDF-to-text step to Make, n8n and Zapier. Simple pricing: $3 per 1,000 PDFs plus $0.20 per 1,000 pages, with no compute bill on top (a 10-page PDF is $0.005, against $0.01–$0.015 at the leading bulk PDF text extractors). Failed downloads, corrupt and scanned-only files are never charged.

What data does it return?

Every run outputs clean, schema-validated rows like these:

url	title	pageCount	wordCount	text
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762	Attention Is All You Need	15	5811	Provided proper attribution is provided, Google hereby grants permission to reproduce the tables and figures…
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/CSWP/NIST.CSWP.29.pdf	The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0	32	9027	The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0\nNational Institute of Standards and Technology…
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf	Form W-9 (Rev. March 2024)	6	6239	Form W-9\n(Rev. March 2024)\nRequest for Taxpayer Identification Number and Certification…

How much does it cost?

Transparent pay-per-event pricing — you only pay for what you get, and the actor always respects your run budget: set a maximum total charge and it stops cleanly at the cap instead of overrunning.

Event	Price	Charged	Worked example
pdf-converted	$0.003	per PDF converted and delivered (all output formats and chunks included)	1,000 PDFs = $3.00 + their pages
page-converted	$0.0002	per page with text converted (scanned pages without text are free)	A 10-page PDF = $0.003 + 10 × $0.0002 = $0.005; a 100-page report = $0.023
apify-actor-start	$0.00005	per run per GB of memory (platform start fee)	One run at 4 GB = $0.0002

Input options

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
urls	array	yes	—	Links to PDF files. You can also add a web page (e.g. a reports or publications page): every PDF it links to is converted.
outputMode	string	no	"document"	One row per PDF (whole document), or one row per page (handy for page-level citations).
outputFormats	array	no	["text"]	Which content fields to return. Same price whatever you pick.
chunkSize	integer	no	0	Also split each PDF into chunks (one-row-per-PDF mode only) of at most this many characters for embedding, split at headings and paragraphs, each with its heading path. 0 = no chunks. Around 1,500–4,000 suits most embedding models.
includePages	boolean	no	false	In one-row-per-PDF mode, also add a pages array with each page's Markdown/text and word count.
maxPagesPerPdf	integer	no	1000	Convert at most this many pages of each PDF (from the start). Longer PDFs are marked truncated.
maxPdfs	integer	no	1000	Stop after converting this many PDFs (including ones found on web pages).
findPdfLinks	boolean	no	true	When a URL is a web page rather than a PDF, convert the PDFs it links to (one level, robots.txt respected).
password	string	no	—	For password-protected PDFs you are entitled to open. Used for every PDF in the run.

Limits & honest notes

• Text is read from the PDF's text layer. Scanned PDFs (images of pages) have no text layer: they are reported and not charged. For those, use our OCR to Text actor (apify.com/actor-forge/ocr-to-text).
• Tables come out as lines of text in reading order, not as Markdown tables. Images and figures are skipped. Mathematical formulas come out as their plain characters.
• Headings are inferred from the layout. Font sizes, section numbers such as "3.1", and the PDF's bookmarks all count, but bold text at body size without numbering stays a paragraph.
• PDFs up to 100 MB and up to 5,000 pages each (1,000 by default). Password-protected PDFs need the password input.
• Web pages in the input are scanned for links to .pdf files (one level deep, robots.txt respected). If a site's robots.txt can't be fetched (HTTP 5xx or a network error, after one retry), the PDFs linked on that site are skipped (RFC 9309) and the page gets a free row saying why. Pages behind a login are not supported.
• Respects your run budget: set a maximum total charge and conversion stops cleanly at the cap, with no PDF charged twice.

Related ActorForge actors

• PDF to Markdown — structured Markdown and RAG chunks
• PDF OCR — for scanned PDFs
• Word, Excel & PowerPoint to Markdown

Changelog

• 2026-10-18 — Initial release: layout-aware Markdown (headings, paragraphs, lists, table of contents), header/footer removal, metadata, plain text, per-page and per-PDF rows, RAG chunks, PDF-link discovery on web pages.

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