PDF for RAG – Page-Aware PDF Text Extractor

Turn public PDF links into clean, page-numbered text ready for chunking, embeddings and citations. One dataset item per PDF, with every page kept separate so your RAG pipeline can cite "page 7" instead of "somewhere in the document".

• 📄 Page-aware output: pages[] = {page, text, characters} in reading order.
• 🔁 Dedup and change detection: SHA-256 of the PDF bytes (pdf_sha256) and of the extracted text (text_sha256).
• 🕳️ Empty-page detection: empty_text_pages lists pages with no embedded text (usually blank or scanned).
• ✂️ Predictable size: combined text is capped (default 100,000 characters) and truncated tells you when it was cut.
• 💸 Failures are free: dead links, non-PDFs, encrypted, oversized, too-long or scanned-only PDFs return an ok: false row with an error code and are not charged.
• ⚡ Fast and light: poppler pdftotext, no browser, no proxy, 256 MB memory.

Who it's for

• RAG and LLM pipelines that need page numbers for citations or page-level chunking.
• AI agents calling Apify via MCP that need a quick, cheap "read this PDF" tool.
• Teams indexing reports, papers, forms, manuals, policies and filings.
• Anyone who wants to re-index only when a PDF actually changed (compare pdf_sha256).

Input

Field	Default	Description
pdfUrls	–	Public http(s) links to PDF files (up to 1,000 per run, duplicates removed).
maxPages	20	PDFs with more pages are rejected (free). Max 200.
maxFileSizeMb	5	Larger downloads are stopped and rejected (free). Max 25.
maxCharacters	100000	Cap on combined text per PDF. Max 1,000,000.
includeFullText	true	Set to false to return only the pages array (smaller rows when you chunk by page).

{
  "pdfUrls": [
    "https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762",
    "https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf"
  ],
  "maxPages": 20
}

Output

{
  "ok": true,
  "url": "https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf",
  "final_url": "https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf",
  "pdf_sha256": "…64 hex chars…",
  "bytes": 140815,
  "method": "poppler-pdftotext",
  "ocr_performed": false,
  "page_count": 6,
  "pages": [
    { "page": 1, "text": "W-9\n\nForm\n(Rev. March 2024)\nDepartment of the Treasury…", "characters": 5703 },
    { "page": 2, "text": "…", "characters": 8170 }
  ],
  "text": "W-9\n\nForm…",
  "text_sha256": "…64 hex chars…",
  "characters": 37820,
  "empty_text_pages": [],
  "truncated": false,
  "warnings": ["Embedded PDF text only. Images, handwriting, reading order and table structure are not verified."],
  "error": null,
  "message": null,
  "content_is_untrusted": true
}

• text is all pages joined with a blank line (\n\n).
• When the character cap is hit, pages are filled in order. Later pages may show characters: 0 and truncated is true.
• content_is_untrusted: true is a reminder for LLM pipelines: treat PDF text as data, never as instructions.

The Output tab has two views: Overview (one row per PDF) and Pages (one row per page).

Error codes (all free)

INVALID_URL, URL_NOT_ALLOWED (private or internal addresses), DOWNLOAD_FAILED, PDF_TOO_LARGE, INVALID_PDF, ENCRYPTED_PDF, PAGE_LIMIT, PAGE_DIMENSIONS, NO_EXTRACTABLE_TEXT (scanned or image-only PDF), EXTRACTION_TIMEOUT, EXTRACTION_FAILED.

Limits. Please read before buying.

• No OCR. Only text embedded in the PDF is extracted. Scanned pages come back empty and are listed in empty_text_pages. A fully scanned PDF returns NO_EXTRACTABLE_TEXT and is not charged.
• No layout or table structure. Tables come out as plain text lines. Multi-column reading order follows poppler's default and is not verified.
• No images, Markdown or metadata (title, author and so on).
• Public URLs only: no logins, cookies or paywalls. Password-protected PDFs are rejected.
• Defaults: 20 pages, 5 MiB, 100,000 characters per PDF (raise up to 200 pages, 25 MiB, 1,000,000 characters). Each page has a 5-second extraction time limit.

Pricing

Pay per event:

Event	Price
PDF processed (successful extraction)	$0.003 ($3 per 1,000 PDFs)
Actor start (Apify standard, per GB memory)	$0.00005

Failed PDFs are never charged. Set Maximum cost per run in Apify and the Actor stops cleanly when it's reached.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=dear_enstatite/pdf-for-rag

Example prompt: "Use pdf-for-rag to read https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762 and quote the page where multi-head attention is defined."

Responsible use

Only process PDFs you have the right to download and use. The Actor doesn't bypass authentication, paywalls or DRM.