PDF Text & Table Extractor

Download any PDF by URL and extract clean per-page text + detected tables + document metadata. Now with OCR support for scanned PDFs. Powered by pdfplumber + Tesseract. Batch up to 50 PDFs. $0.01 per PDF + $0.0005/page (OCR: $0.002/page).

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Why this exists

PDFs are how every important document gets distributed — SEC filings, research papers, financial reports, government records. But the raw bytes aren't searchable, can't be fed to LLMs, can't be ingested into databases.

This actor handles the conversion. You give it a URL list; it returns a structured per-page dataset including:

• Clean extracted text (preserving reading order)
• Detected tables as 2D arrays (ready for CSV / Sheets export)
• Document-level metadata (title, author, creation date)

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What you get

Summary row (one per PDF)

{
  "_type": "summary",
  "url": "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/.../aapl-10k.pdf",
  "ok": true,
  "page_count": 80,
  "title": "Apple Inc. — Annual Report 2024",
  "author": "Apple Inc.",
  "creator": "InDesign",
  "producer": "Adobe Distiller",
  "created": "D:20240928081300Z",
  "modified": "D:20240928081400Z"
}

Per-page row

{
  "_type": "page",
  "url": "https://...",
  "page": 12,
  "char_count": 3210,
  "word_count": 524,
  "text": "Item 1A. Risk Factors\n\nOur business...",
  "tables": [
    [
      ["Revenue", "Q1 2024", "Q4 2023"],
      ["iPhone", "$45.96B", "$43.81B"],
      ["Mac", "$9.66B", "$7.61B"]
    ]
  ],
  "table_count": 1
}

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Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
urls	array	—	List of PDF URLs to extract (batch mode)
url	string	—	Single PDF URL (used when urls is empty)
outputFormat	string	per_page	per_page (one record/page), combined (one record/PDF), or both
extractTables	boolean	true	Detect and extract tables as 2D arrays
extractImages	boolean	false	Add image_count field to each page
enableOcr	boolean	false	Enable OCR for scanned pages (pages with < 50 chars auto-detected)
ocrLanguage	string	eng	Tesseract language: eng, deu, fra, jpn, or combined eng+deu
startPage	integer	1	First page to extract (1-indexed)
endPage	integer	—	Last page to extract (inclusive)
maxPages	integer	500	Max pages per PDF from startPage
userAgent	string	—	Custom User-Agent for the HTTP request

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Quick start

Single PDF

{
  "url": "https://www.example.com/whitepaper.pdf"
}

Batch of 10-K filings from SEC

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/aapl-10k.pdf",
    "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/msft-10k.pdf"
  ],
  "extractTables": true,
  "maxPages": 200
}

Text-only (skip tables for speed)

{
  "url": "https://...",
  "extractTables": false
}

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OCR for Scanned PDFs

Enable enableOcr: true to handle scanned or image-based PDFs (bank statements, legal filings, old reports). The actor automatically detects pages with little extractable text and falls back to Tesseract OCR.

{
  "url": "https://example.com/scanned-report.pdf",
  "enableOcr": true,
  "ocrLanguage": "eng"
}

Each page row includes "ocr_applied": true when OCR was used, so you can distinguish native-text pages from OCR-processed ones.

Supported languages: eng (English), deu (German), fra (French), spa (Spanish), jpn (Japanese), and all Tesseract languages. Multi-language: "eng+deu".

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Pricing

Pay-Per-Event:

• $0.01 — flat per PDF (download + metadata)
• $0.0005 — per page extracted (native text)
• $0.002 — per page extracted with OCR (scanned pages)

Run	PDFs × Pages	Cost
One 80-page 10-K (native text)	1 × 80	$0.05
Batch of 10 research papers	10 × 20	$0.20
20-page scanned PDF with OCR	1 × 20 OCR	$0.14
Quarterly: 50 earnings releases	50 × 15	$0.88

Vs Adobe Acrobat Pro DC ($23/mo) for manual extraction, or DocParser ($199/mo for API) — this is 5-10x cheaper at typical volumes.

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Use cases

1. SEC filings — Pull text + tables from 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K. Combine with our SEC EDGAR Tracker.
2. Research aggregation — Build a searchable database of academic papers + abstracts
3. Financial reports — Auto-extract earnings tables from quarterly releases
4. LLM RAG — Convert PDFs to chunks for vector search / Q&A
5. Compliance audit — Index every PDF in your corporate document store

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Limitations

• Scanned PDFs (image-only) — Returns empty text. Use OCR for scanned PDFs.
• Complex layouts — Multi-column research papers may merge column text awkwardly. Tweak with custom extraction parameters in v0.2.
• Encrypted PDFs — Will fail with a clear error message.

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Data engine

• pdfplumber v0.11+ — Pure-Python, robust, used by countless data-engineering pipelines.
• No OCR in this actor. For OCR, combine with a separate actor that runs Tesseract or Vision API.

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Related actors (same author)

• Web Page → Markdown Converter — HTML version of the same idea
• HTML Metadata Extractor
• SEC EDGAR Filing Tracker — Get the SEC filing URLs to feed in
• JSON Schema Generator

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Feedback

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