PDF & Image to Text: Bulk, Markdown, Tables, OCR

PDF & Image to Text turns PDFs and images into clean Markdown or plain text, in bulk. Give it a list of file URLs, or point it at any Apify dataset of document links, and each document becomes one row with its text, its tables (as rows of cells), the PDF's title, author and creation date, and which pages needed OCR. Scanned pages and images (PNG, JPEG, TIFF, WEBP, BMP, GIF) are read with Tesseract OCR in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch.

Why this Actor

• Markdown for LLMs and search. Headings come from font sizes (#, ##, ###), bullet and numbered lists become Markdown lists, wrapped lines are joined into paragraphs (exam- + ple = example), and tables drawn with ruling lines become Markdown tables in the right place in the text (borderless tables come out as aligned text lines).
• Reading order that follows the page. Two-column layouts are read column by column, not line by line across both columns, with full-width titles and footers kept in place.
• OCR only where it's needed. In the default auto mode, pages with a real text layer are read directly (fast and exact) and only pages without one (scans) are rendered and OCR'd. You pay for OCR only on those pages, and blank pages are never OCR'd or charged.
• Tables as data. Tables drawn with ruling lines also come back in a tables array, one list of cells per row, with the page number, ready for a spreadsheet.
• Detects the file type from the content, not the URL, so links like /download?id=42 work. HTML error pages, ZIPs and other files get a clear error row instead of garbage.
• One bad file never stops the run. Password-protected, damaged and oversized files, 404s and timeouts each get an error row, and those rows are free. Damaged PDFs that the main parser can't read are retried with a second, more forgiving PDF engine.
• Guards against risky link lists. Downloads to private, loopback, link-local and cloud-metadata addresses are refused, on the first request and on every redirect. File size is capped while downloading (compressed downloads included).

Use cases

• RAG and LLM ingestion: turn reports, manuals, papers and policies into Markdown, then load them into a vector database or prompt.
• Invoices, statements and reports to text: extract the text and tables of business PDFs for parsing, search or data entry.
• Scanned documents: OCR scanned contracts, letters and archive PDFs that have no text layer.
• Image OCR: read text from screenshots, photos of documents, receipts and multi-page TIFF faxes.
• Enriching a dataset of document links: a scraper collected PDF links; this Actor adds each document's text next to the scraped fields.

How to use it

1. Add PDF or image URLs, and/or pick a Dataset to enrich. For datasets, set URL fields if the links aren't in url, pdfUrl, fileUrl or link.
2. Pick the Output format (Markdown or plain text) and, for scans in other languages, the OCR languages.
3. Optional: limit Pages (e.g. 1-5,8), turn on One row per page for page-level chunks and citations, or raise Max file size.
4. Run it. Export as JSON, CSV or Excel, or chain it with an integration.

Input example

{
  "urls": ["https://example.com/annual-report-2025.pdf", "https://example.com/scans/contract.pdf", "https://example.com/receipt.jpg"],
  "outputFormat": "markdown",
  "ocr": "auto",
  "ocrLanguages": ["eng", "deu"],
  "extractTables": true,
  "outputPerPage": false,
  "maxFileSizeMb": 50
}

Output example (shortened; values are illustrative)

{
  "url": "https://example.com/annual-report-2025.pdf",
  "fileType": "pdf",
  "mimeType": "application/pdf",
  "pageCount": 48,
  "pagesProcessed": 48,
  "ocrPages": [47, 48],
  "format": "markdown",
  "text": "# Annual Report 2025\n\n## Revenue Overview\n\nRevenue grew 12% ...\n\n| Region | Q2 | Q3 |\n| --- | --- | --- |\n| Europe | 1,200 | 1,550 |",
  "charCount": 96412,
  "truncated": false,
  "tables": [{"page": 3, "rows": [["Region", "Q2", "Q3"], ["Europe", "1,200", "1,550"]]}],
  "title": "Annual Report 2025",
  "author": "Example Ltd",
  "creationDate": "2026-02-03T09:15:00Z",
  "fileSizeBytes": 2483120,
  "warnings": [],
  "error": null,
  "processedAt": "2026-10-16T12:00:00Z"
}

With One row per page, each row also has page, and text, tables and ocrPages cover that page only. Failed URLs have error set (for example PDF is password-protected, HTTP 404 Not Found, File is larger than the 50 MB limit) and empty text. warnings notes things like pages skipped by the page limit or scanned pages left unread with OCR off. With Keep the item's original fields (the default), dataset items keep all their fields and gain these columns. A run summary is saved as OUTPUT in the key-value store.

How much does it cost?

Pay per event, Apify platform usage included:

Apify Store discounts: the prices above are for Apify's Free plan. Paid plans pay less per 1,000: processed documents $4.50 on Starter, $4.00 on Scale, $3.50 on Business; OCR pages $13.50, $12.00 and $10.50. The "from" price at the top of the Store page is the Business price.

• $0.005 per run (run start).

• $0.005 per document (PDF or image).

• $0.015 per OCR'd page: each scanned PDF page that was OCR'd, and each page after the first of a multi-page TIFF (an image's price includes OCR of its first page).

• A document is charged once whether you get one row or one row per page.

• PDF pages read from their text layer cost nothing extra; only pages that were actually OCR'd add $0.015 (listed in ocrPages). With OCR always, every processed page is OCR'd and charged, except blank pages, which are never OCR'd or charged.

• Free: failed downloads, files that aren't a PDF or image, password-protected files, files too damaged to read at all, invalid URLs, and repeats skipped by Process each URL once.

Worked examples:

Examples use the Free-plan rate. Where an example doesn't add it, each run also has its run-start charge, counted per GB of Actor memory (minimum one; one at the default memory); Apify Proxy (where used) is billed separately.

• 1,000 text-based PDFs (reports, invoices) in one run: $0.005 + 1,000 × $0.005 = $5.005.
• 100 scanned PDFs of 10 pages each: $0.005 + 100 × $0.005 + 1,000 × $0.015 = $15.505.
• 500 receipt photos: $0.005 + 500 × $0.005 = $2.505.
• One 20-page TIFF fax: $0.005 + $0.005 + 19 × $0.015 = $0.295.

If you set a maximum cost per run, the Actor checks the price of each document (including its OCR pages) before storing it and stops cleanly when the next document wouldn't fit. Nothing is stored that wasn't paid for, and nothing is charged that wasn't stored.

FAQ and limits

How accurate is the OCR?

It depends on the scan. Clean, straight scans at normal print size read very well; low-resolution, skewed, blurry or faint scans produce errors. Raise OCR resolution to 300 for small print. Handwriting is not supported in any reliable way, and pages that display sideways (scanned sideways without a rotation flag, or rotated the wrong way in the file) are not auto-rotated, so their text comes out garbled. Rotated text in a text-layer PDF (such as a sideways stamp in the margin or a sideways table heading) is left out of the output on purpose, because it would come out one letter per line.

Why is a scanned page empty?

OCR is set to never, or the page has a little real text (a stamp, a header) and only the rest is scanned. Auto OCRs a page only when it has fewer than about 20 readable characters and contains an image or drawing (a page whose only content is a few words of real text, such as a title page, is returned as is); use OCR: always for such documents.

Which tables are detected?

Tables drawn with ruling lines (cell borders). Borderless tables come out as text, one tab-separated (plain text) or space-separated (Markdown) line per row. Merged cells come back as separate cells, some of them empty.

Are there size limits?

50 MB per file by default (up to 200 MB), 200 pages per document by default (up to 2,000), and images up to 80 megapixels. The text of one row is capped at 2,000,000 characters (Apify's 9 MB item limit), with truncated: true; use One row per page for very long documents. A file that takes more than 5 minutes on a single page is stopped with an error row.

Can it open password-protected PDFs?

No. Those return PDF is password-protected (free). PDFs that only restrict printing or copying open normally.

Does it read form fields, attachments or scripts in PDFs?

It reads the text drawn on each page. Values typed into fillable form fields are usually not part of the text layer and are not read (except on pages that are OCR'd). Attachments and scripts are ignored.

Other tools by the same author

Actor	Use it to
Vector DB Sync: Pinecone & Qdrant RAG Loader	Chunk, embed and load the extracted text into Pinecone or Qdrant (its default text field is text, ID field url).
Dataset Filter & Transform	Keep only the columns you need, drop failed rows, rename fields.
Google Sheets Sync	Send extracted text or table rows to a Google Sheet.
Merge & Deduplicate Datasets	Keep only new document links between runs, so each file is processed once.

Built with permissively licensed open-source software: pdfplumber and pdfminer.six (MIT) for text and tables, pypdfium2 (Apache-2.0/BSD-3) for page rendering, and Tesseract OCR (Apache-2.0) via pytesseract.