📄 PDF Text Extractor — Extract Text from PDF Links

Give PDF links, or web pages that link to PDFs, and get the text of each PDF as one row: full text, page and word counts, optional per-page text with page labels, and the document's title, subject, keywords, creating application, producer and dates.

Text is read with PDFium, the engine inside Chrome, so columns, ligatures and non-Latin scripts come out cleanly and fast. Long documents are fine: a record holds up to 1.5 million characters, and anything longer is also saved in full as a text file with a link. Scanned PDFs with no text layer and password-protected PDFs are skipped and not billed.

The unit of output is one PDF delivered. Skipped files are not billed.

Who buys this and for what job

• AI and RAG builders turning PDF libraries into text for embedding and search.
• Analysts and researchers pulling text from reports, filings and papers in bulk.
• Compliance teams indexing published documents for keyword monitoring.
• Developers who need a PDF-to-text step in a pipeline without running their own parser.

Buyers usually search for this as "PDF to text API", "extract text from PDF URL" or "PDF scraper".

📊 Sample Output

file_name	title	page_count	word_count	created_at
p1fa.pdf	Publication 1 (FA) (Rev. 9-2017)	2	2329	2020-07-31T17:22:37Z
p1ar.pdf	Publication 1 (AR) (Rev. 9-2017)	2	1797	2020-07-31T17:36:59Z
p1bn.pdf	Publication 1 (BN) (Rev. 9-2017)	2	4637	2020-07-31T17:29:52Z
p1fr.pdf	Publication 1 (FR) (Rev. 9-2017)	2	2432	2020-07-31T17:17:26Z
p1guj.pdf	Publication 1 (GUJ) (Rev. 9-2017)	2	3913	2020-07-31T17:10:00Z

Rows from live run c2eJyMXNXuF1mPNr2 on Apify (40 PDFs collected from two IRS forms pages). Notice the page counts run from a 1-page form to publications of over 100 pages; each is one record.

✅ What you get

Every field of each record:

• record_id, sha256, bytes — file hash (record_id is its first 24 characters) and size.
• url, final_url, found_on_page, file_name — the PDF link, where it was served from, the page it was found on, and the file name.
• text, text_chars, word_count — the text (pages separated by a blank line) and its size.
• text_truncated, full_text_url — true when the text was over 1.5 million characters; the full text is then saved as a file at full_text_url.
• pages — per-page text with page number and label (when includePages is on).
• page_count, pages_read, pdf_version, page_labels_used, is_tagged — document structure.
• title, subject, keywords, creator_app, producer, created_at, modified_at — document metadata (the Author field is not delivered).
• read_at — when it was read (UTC).

⚙️ Sample inputs

One PDF (the Store example)

{
  "pdfUrls": ["https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf"],
  "maxDocuments": 10
}

Full text and metadata of the W-4 form.

Every PDF a page links to

{
  "pdfUrls": ["https://www.irs.gov/forms-instructions-and-publications"],
  "maxDocuments": 50
}

Reads the page's PDF links, in page order.

Per-page text, first 10 pages only

{
  "pdfUrls": ["https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p17.pdf"],
  "includePages": true,
  "maxPagesPerDocument": 10,
  "maxDocuments": 1
}

For page-level search or chunking.

Input fields:

Field	Meaning
pdfUrls	PDF links, or pages with PDF links (up to 2,000).
followPdfLinks	read PDFs linked from pages (default true).
maxPdfsPerPage	PDF links taken per page (default 50).
includePages	add per-page text (default false).
maxPagesPerDocument	pages read per PDF (default 2,000).
maxFileMb	skip PDFs bigger than this (default 100).
maxDocuments	stop after this many delivered PDFs (default 1,000). Each delivered PDF is billed.

🧾 JSON sample record

{
  "record_id": "92444d8856ce55d9e25dca8b",
  "url": "https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf",
  "final_url": "https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf",
  "found_on_page": null,
  "file_name": "fw4.pdf",
  "bytes": 208845,
  "sha256": "92444d8856ce55d9e25dca8b6d1420634fc68b11e1ab1f760916ea29ddd312b2",
  "pdf_version": "1.7",
  "page_count": 5,
  "pages_read": 5,
  "text": "Form W-4\n2026\nEmployee’s Withholding Certificate\nDepartment of the Treasury\nInternal Revenue Service\nComplete Form W-4 so that your employer can withhold the correct federal income tax from your pay.\nGive Form W-4 to your employer.\nYour withholding is subject to review by the IRS.\nOMB No. 1545-0074\nStep 1:\nEnter\nPersonal\nInformation\n(a) First name and middle initial Last name\nAddress\nCity or town, state, and ZIP code\n(b) Social security number\nDoes your name match the\nname on your social security\ncard? If not, to ensure you get\ncredit for your earnings,\ncontact SSA at 800-772-1213\nor go to www …",
  "text_chars": 25713,
  "word_count": 4954,
  "text_truncated": false,
  "full_text_url": null,
  "pages": [
    {
      "page": 1,
      "label": null,
      "text": "Form W-4\n2026\nEmployee’s Withholding Certificate\nDepartment of the Treasury\nInternal Revenue Service\nComplete Form W-4 so that your employer can withhold the correct federal income tax from your pay.\n …",
      "chars": 4728
    },
    {
      "page": 2,
      "label": null,
      "text": "Form W-4 (2026) Page 2\nGeneral Instructions\nSection references are to the Internal Revenue Code unless\notherwise noted.\nFuture Developments\nFor the latest information about developments related to For …",
      "chars": 7271
    },
    "… 3 more pages"
  ],
  "title": "2026 Form W-4",
  "subject": "Employee's Withholding Certificate",
  "keywords": "Fillable",
  "creator_app": "Designer 6.5",
  "producer": "Designer 6.5",
  "created_at": "2025-12-11T13:15:41Z",
  "modified_at": "2025-12-11T13:15:41Z",
  "page_labels_used": false,
  "is_tagged": true,
  "read_at": "2026-10-17T03:50:39Z"
}

🔧 How it works

PDFs are downloaded 6 at a time, checked for the %PDF signature, and read page by page with pypdfium2 (PDFium). A PDF whose pages give no text at all is reported as scanned (it needs OCR) and not billed. The PDF's Author metadata is never delivered.

Every run reads each host's robots.txt first: a path it disallows is skipped, listed in the run receipt and never charged. Only public internet addresses are fetched (no private, loopback or cloud-metadata addresses, checked again on every redirect). No logins, no CAPTCHA solving, no proxies.

Delivery is pushed first and charged after. The run receipt (RUN_RECEIPT) lists every link with its outcome (for pages: PDF links found and what happened to each), the robots.txt result per host, and the delivered and charged counts.

💰 Pricing example

Per PDF delivered, no start fee, no monthly charge:

Apify plan	Price per PDF
Free	$0.05
Bronze	$0.045
Silver	$0.04
Gold, Platinum, Diamond	$0.0335

• 10 PDFs: $0.50 on the Free plan, $0.335 on Gold.
• 1,000 PDFs: $50.00 on Free, $33.50 on Gold.
• 10,000 PDFs: $500.00 on Free, $335.00 on Gold.

Coverage and size. Proof runs on 17 Oct 2026: 40 IRS PDFs from two pages in about 8 seconds, from 1-page forms to the 126-page Form 1040 instructions, each read in full. Text-layer PDFs only; for scans use the Image OCR Text Extractor.

⚖️ Legal & ToS

Documents belong to their owners. You choose the links. Make sure you have the right to download and use the content you point it at; the actor fetches only what you give it (and, where you turn it on, what those pages link to).

Every run reads each host's robots.txt first: a path it disallows is skipped, listed in the run receipt and never charged. Only public internet addresses are fetched (no private, loopback or cloud-metadata addresses, checked again on every redirect). No logins, no CAPTCHA solving, no proxies.

❓ FAQ

Does it OCR scanned PDFs? No. A PDF with no text layer is skipped and not billed; the Image OCR Text Extractor reads scans.

Are tables kept? Text comes out in reading order with line breaks; table cells are not split into columns.

Can it open password-protected PDFs? No. They are skipped and not billed.

🆘 Troubleshooting

• skipped: no text layer — The PDF is a scan; use OCR.
• text_truncated is true — The document has over 1.5 million characters; download full_text_url (add your token if storages are private).
• SOURCE UNAVAILABLE — None of your links could be reached after retries. Nothing was charged.

🔗 Related Actors

• PR Newswire Scraper — press releases by company or topic
• Website Tech Stack Detector — what a site is built with
• Website Contact Scraper — contact details from website lists

🏢 About NexGen Signal — data tools and official-source data products on Apify. Browse the catalog: apify.com/nexgensignal

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