PDF Text Extractor - PDF to Text, Markdown & Tables, by Page

Bulk PDF to text: paste links to your PDFs, press Start, and get every page's text, its tables and a Markdown version, ready to download as CSV, Excel or JSON. $1.00 per 1,000 PDF pages.

What you get back

One row per PDF page, in page order. Below is page 1 of California's public WARN report (16 pages; a sample file of the pdfplumber project), from our run on 13 October 2026, as returned. That run read 17 pages from two PDFs in 11.8 seconds.

text (first lines):

WARN Report*
Summary by Received Date
07/01/2015 - 03/25/2016
...
Notice Date Effective Received Company City No. Of Layoff/Closure
06/22/2015 03/25/2016 07/01/2015 Maxim Integrated Product San Jose 150 Closure Permanent
06/30/2015 08/29/2015 07/01/2015 McGraw-Hill Education Monterey 137 Layoff Unknown at this time

tables (each table is a list of rows, each row a list of cells; first rows):

[["Notice Date", "Effective", "Received", "Company", "City", "No. Of", "Layoff/Closure"],
 ["06/22/2015", "03/25/2016", "07/01/2015", "Maxim Integrated Product", "San Jose", "150", "Closure Permanent"],
 ["06/30/2015", "08/29/2015", "07/01/2015", "McGraw-Hill Education", "Monterey", "137", "Layoff Unknown at this time"]]

markdown (the page text, then the same table as a Markdown table; the table part, first rows):

| Notice Date | Effective | Received | Company | City | No. Of | Layoff/Closure |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 06/22/2015 | 03/25/2016 | 07/01/2015 | Maxim Integrated Product | San Jose | 150 | Closure Permanent |

Plus page (1), pageCount (16), wordCount (453) and documentTitle (empty for this file).

How to extract text from many PDFs at once (no code)

1. Open the tool on Apify and sign in (a free Apify account; Google sign-in works).
2. In PDF URLs, paste your links, one per line (up to 50 MB and 500 pages per PDF by default).
3. Press Start.
4. In the run's Output, click Export and choose CSV, Excel or JSON. You get one row per page.

The links must be PDF files anyone can download (not a Google Drive or Dropbox preview page).

PDF to Markdown, for ChatGPT, Claude or a RAG pipeline

Every page also comes as markdown: the page text, followed by each table on the page as a Markdown table, so a language model also sees the table structure (table cells appear twice: in the text and in the table). Join the pages in page order to get the whole document.

PDF tables to Excel or CSV

Each table on a page comes in tables as rows of cells, and as a Markdown table inside markdown. In a JSON export the rows are ready to use; in a CSV or Excel export Apify spreads nested lists over many columns, so for tables JSON is the easier format. Not every table is detected: tables drawn without ruling lines (common in papers and in some reports) come as plain text lines in text, in reading order.

Scanned PDFs

This tool reads the text that's already in the PDF and has no OCR, so scanned pages come back without text. For scans, use our OCR Image to Text: it reads scanned PDFs page by page in 31 languages.

Use it as a PDF to text API, or from n8n, Make and Zapier

Every run can also be started over Apify's API. This call reads one PDF and returns the rows as JSON when it's done (put your own Apify API token in place of YOUR_TOKEN):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/afterstar~pdf-to-text/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://example.com/report.pdf"]}'

Add &format=csv to the address to get CSV instead of JSON. A synchronous call waits at most 5 minutes; for big batches, start a run (/runs instead of /run-sync-get-dataset-items) and read its dataset when it finishes. Apify's n8n, Make and Zapier integrations run the tool the same way.

What does PDF Text Extractor do?

For each PDF link: one row per page with the page text, the tables as rows, the page text plus its tables as Markdown tables (markdown), the word count, the page count and the document title.

Run it once, or schedule it to list only the pages that changed in your PDFs. The tool remembers what it has seen, in a storage in your own Apify account.

What you get

Input	Links to PDF files, one per line (up to 50 MB each, up to 500 pages by default)
Per page	The page text, its tables as rows, the page text plus its tables as Markdown tables (markdown), word count, page count, document title
Schedule	Only the pages that changed since the last run
Price	$1.00 per 1,000 PDF pages; on a schedule $1.20 per 1,000 unchanged documents checked

Use cases

• Turn reports, price lists or regulations into text for AI tools or search.
• Pull tables out of PDF reports into a spreadsheet.
• Watch a set of PDFs and get only the pages that changed.

Input

Field	What it does
PDF URLs	Links to PDF files, one per line
Max pages per PDF	Default 500
Output mode	All results, only new results, or new + changed + removed results

Output

One row per PDF page (page 1 of the WARN report above, as a first run returns it; text, tables and markdown shortened with …, other keys left out):

{
  "id": "pdf:https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jsvine/pdfplumber/stable/examples/pdfs/ca-warn-report.pdf#p1",
  "changeType": "new",
  "url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jsvine/pdfplumber/stable/examples/pdfs/ca-warn-report.pdf",
  "page": 1,
  "pageCount": 16,
  "documentTitle": null,
  "text": "WARN Report*\nSummary by Received Date\n07/01/2015 - 03/25/2016\n…",
  "tables": [[["Notice Date", "Effective", "Received", "Company", "City", "No. Of", "Layoff/Closure"], ["06/22/2015", "03/25/2016", "07/01/2015", "Maxim Integrated Product", "San Jose", "150", "Closure Permanent"], …]],
  "markdown": "WARN Report*\n…\n| Notice Date | Effective | Received | Company | City | No. Of | Layoff/Closure |\n…",
  "wordCount": 453
}

Every row has every key (null when there's no value). changeType is new, changed, unchanged or removed; a changed row lists changedFields and the previous values. If a source fails or rate-limits the request, you get one row with changeType: "status" and a statusCode instead of an error, and it's free.

Schedule it

1. Fill in the input and save it as a task.
2. Run it once with Baseline only switched on: it remembers the current results and lists nothing. Or skip this and accept that the first scheduled run lists everything once.
3. Set Output mode to Only new results or New, changed and removed, and add a schedule.
4. Connect an integration (Slack, Google Sheets, Zapier, Make, n8n), or put a webhook URL in the input.

Each saved task keeps its own memory; switching a task between modes keeps it. Each run saves a summary (OUTPUT in the run's key-value store) with the counts.

Apify webhook template (Integrations → Webhook → payload):

{"datasetUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/{{resource.defaultDatasetId}}/items?clean=true&format=json"}

How much does it cost?

• $1.00 per 1,000 PDF pages listed (on paid Apify plans 10-30% less).
• You pay only this price, no separate Apify platform usage. Apify's free plan includes $5 of credit a month, enough for about 5,000 PDF pages here.
• On a schedule (only new, changed or removed PDF pages): $1.20 per 1,000 unchanged documents checked plus $1.00 per 1,000 new, changed or removed PDF pages.
• Example: 1,000 PDF pages cost $1.00; watching 10 PDFs every day, where none changes, costs about $0.36 a month (plus Apify's start fee: $0.00005 per run).
• Status rows (errors) are free. Set a spending limit on the run and the tool stops there.

Good to know

• No OCR: pages of scanned PDFs have no text. A PDF with no text at all gives a free status row.
• On a schedule, new, changed or removed pages cost $1 per 1,000 and an unchanged document $1.20 per 1,000.
• Files up to 50 MB. The tool follows each site's robots.txt.

How it compares

Instead of	With this tool
Copying text out of a PDF viewer	Every page of every PDF in one table, with tables kept as rows
Converting files one by one	A whole list of PDF links in one run, page by page
Re-reading reports that change	'Changes' mode lists only the pages whose text changed

FAQ

Does it read scanned PDFs? No: it has no OCR, so pages of scanned PDFs come back without text, and a PDF with no text at all gives a free status row. For scans, use our OCR Image to Text.

How are tables returned? Each table comes as rows (a list of cells) and as a Markdown table, next to the page text. Tables drawn without lines (common in papers) and chart frames are not returned as tables; the page text keeps every word in reading order.

Can I upload a PDF? Give a link to the PDF file. The tool follows each site's robots.txt.

How big can a PDF be? Up to 50 MB, and up to 500 pages by default (Max pages per PDF).

What does a schedule cost? New, changed or removed pages cost $1 per 1,000 and an unchanged document $1.20 per 1,000.

Source: the PDF files you link to. Extraction by pdfplumber (MIT).

More Afterstar tools

• Audio Transcription & Speech to Text - Video, Podcasts, SRT: Turns audio and video files (your own uploads, direct file links, public podcast feeds) into text and subtitles (SRT/VTT) in ~99 languages, on the open-source Whisper model, run inside the tool (no API key).

Found a problem or need a field? Open an issue on the Issues tab.