PDF Text Extractor & Document to Markdown (Word, Excel, PPT)

What does PDF Text Extractor & Document to Markdown do?

This Actor extracts text from PDF, Word (DOCX), PowerPoint (PPTX), Excel (XLSX), HTML, EPUB, CSV, JSON and XML files and returns it as clean, LLM-ready Markdown. Scanned PDFs and images (PNG, JPG, TIFF, WebP, BMP) are read with built-in OCR. Use it as a bulk PDF text extractor, a PDF to Markdown converter, an OCR tool for scans or a document parser for AI pipelines. Give it a list of file URLs and it returns one result per document: the Markdown text, the document title, file type, word count and how many pages were read with OCR.

It is built for RAG pipelines, AI agents, search indexing and knowledge bases, where you need the text of many documents in one consistent format. Because it runs on the Apify platform, you get API access, scheduling, webhooks, integrations (Make, Zapier, n8n, LangChain, LlamaIndex) and run monitoring out of the box.

Why use this PDF text extractor?

• One tool for every common format. No separate PDF, Word and PowerPoint parsers to maintain.
• Markdown keeps structure. Headings, lists and tables survive the conversion, so chunking and embeddings work better than with flat text.
• Excel sheets become Markdown tables that language models can read directly.
• OCR for scanned PDFs and images, with no Google and no external APIs. Pages without a text layer are read with the open-source Tesseract engine inside your run, in 14 languages. Your files never leave the run.
• Mixed PDFs just work. In a PDF with both text pages and scanned pages, only the scanned pages go through OCR, and the text stays in page order.
• Pay only for documents that convert. Downloads that fail, files that are too large and unsupported formats are never charged. OCR is charged only for pages where it found readable text.
• Batch friendly. Paste hundreds of URLs or upload a text file with one URL per line; files are processed in parallel.

Typical uses: feeding company documents into a chatbot, indexing research papers, extracting text from pitch decks and reports, digitizing scanned archives and receipts, preparing training or evaluation data, and giving AI agents a reliable "read this file" tool.

How to extract text from PDF and Word files

1. Click Try for free.
2. In File URLs, paste direct links to your documents (or upload a text file of URLs).
3. Click Start.
4. When the run finishes, open the Output tab. The Overview view lists every file and its status; the Markdown view shows the converted text.
5. Download the results as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or fetch them through the API.

Input

Field	Description	Default
File URLs	Direct links to documents. Duplicates are removed automatically.	–
Include Markdown in output	Turn off to get only metadata (type, title, word count).	On
OCR mode	Auto reads images and PDF pages that have no text layer. Off never runs OCR (images fail, scanned pages come back empty). Force reads every PDF page with OCR, even pages that already have text.	Auto
OCR languages	Languages in your scans: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Bulgarian, Romanian, Czech, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish. Pick up to 5.	English
Maximum OCR pages per file	OCR stops after this many pages in one file; the result is marked ocrTruncated.	200
Maximum file size (MB)	Larger files are skipped and not charged.	50
Files processed in parallel	Higher is faster but uses more memory.	5

Example input:

{
  "fileUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tests/xhtml/testfiles/resources/pdf/dummy.pdf" },
    { "url": "https://calibre-ebook.com/downloads/demos/demo.docx" }
  ],
  "includeMarkdown": true
}

Output

Each document produces one item in the dataset:

{
  "url": "https://calibre-ebook.com/downloads/demos/demo.docx",
  "fileName": "demo.docx",
  "fileType": "docx",
  "fileSizeBytes": 1311881,
  "title": "Text Formatting",
  "markdown": "Demonstration of DOCX support in calibre\n\nThis document demonstrates ...",
  "wordCount": 1703,
  "characterCount": 11139,
  "likelyScanned": false,
  "status": "success",
  "error": null,
  "processedAt": "2026-09-15T09:12:44.120Z"
}

A scanned page or image read with OCR looks like this (real output, text shortened):

{
  "url": "https://archive.org/download/aberpa.whittierjg.1887.statue/page/n10.jpg",
  "fileName": "aberpa.whittierjg.1887.statue_0010.jpg",
  "fileType": "jpg",
  "fileSizeBytes": 686743,
  "title": "STATUE OF LIBERTY. ae",
  "markdown": "STATUE OF LIBERTY. ae\n\nWAR DEPARTMENT, t\nWASHINGTON City, September 27, 1886.\n\nGENERAL: Among the requirements of the\nJoint Resolution of Congress, approved March 3, ...",
  "wordCount": 204,
  "characterCount": 1226,
  "likelyScanned": false,
  "ocrPages": 1,
  "ocrLanguages": ["eng"],
  "ocrTruncated": false,
  "status": "success",
  "error": null
}

A file that cannot be converted is still listed, with "status": "failed" and a plain-language error such as "Download failed with HTTP 404 Not Found: the file was not found at this URL."

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

Output fields

Field	Meaning
url	The URL you provided
fileName	File name from the server or the URL
fileType	pdf, docx, pptx, xlsx, html, epub, csv, json, xml, txt, md, png, jpg, tiff, webp or bmp
title	Document title from its metadata, or its first heading
markdown	The converted text
wordCount, characterCount	Size of the converted text
likelyScanned	true when a PDF has pages without a text layer (scanned images)
ocrPages	Number of pages or images where OCR found readable text (these are the charged OCR pages)
ocrLanguages	OCR languages used, when OCR ran
ocrTruncated	true when OCR stopped early because of Maximum OCR pages per file or your maximum cost per run
status, error	success or failed, with the reason for failures

How much does it cost to convert documents and scans to text?

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing with two events. See the Pricing tab for current prices.

• Document converted: a small fee for each document that converts successfully. Failed downloads and unsupported files cost nothing.
• OCR page: charged separately for each scanned PDF page or image where OCR found readable text. Text PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and the other text formats never use OCR, so they never incur this charge. Pages that OCR could not read (illustrations, blank scans) are not charged.

Platform compute is included in the price. You can set a maximum cost per run: the Actor OCRs only as many pages as your budget allows, marks the file ocrTruncated, and skips files it can no longer afford.

Tips

• Use direct file links. A link to a "download page" returns that page's HTML, not the file.
• Choose the right OCR languages. Tesseract reads a language much better when it is selected. Add only the languages that appear in your documents; each one slows OCR down.
• Avoid OCR charges by setting OCR mode to Off when you only need text PDFs and office files.
• Force mode helps when a PDF has a broken or garbled text layer; it re-reads every page with OCR.
• OCR speed: about 1–2 seconds per page at the default memory. For large scanned batches, try 2–4 GB of memory so more pages can run in parallel.
• Large batches: keep parallel files at 5–10. Some servers rate-limit many simultaneous downloads.
• Metadata only: turn off Include Markdown in output to quickly check file types and sizes across many URLs.

Supported formats and limitations

• Supported: PDF (text and scanned), DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, EPUB, CSV, JSON, XML, TXT, MD, and images: PNG, JPG, TIFF (including multi-page), WebP, BMP.
• OCR works best on printed text in clean scans. It is weak on handwriting, phone photos taken at an angle, multi-column layouts and complex tables; reading order can differ from the visual layout. OCR text is plain paragraphs, without Markdown headings or tables.
• Not supported yet: legacy .doc, .ppt and .xls files, password-protected documents, HEIC photos, languages outside the list above.
• HTML pages are converted as a whole, including navigation text. For clean article extraction from websites, use a web crawler Actor.
• Files that need a login or that block automated downloads cannot be fetched.

Related tools

Build a content or RAG pipeline with these tools:

• Audio & Video Transcriber: turn audio, video and podcast episodes into text and subtitles.
• RSS Feed Reader & Finder: read RSS, Atom and JSON feeds or find the feed of any website.
• Sitemap URL Extractor: list every URL of a website from its sitemaps, or only new and removed pages.

FAQ and support

Is my data stored? Documents are downloaded only for conversion. OCR runs inside your run with Tesseract; nothing is sent to Google or any other external API. Results are saved to your own Apify dataset, which you control.

Can I use this with AI agents? Yes. The Actor works through the Apify API and the Apify MCP server, so agents can call it as a document-reading tool.

Something doesn't convert correctly? Open an issue in the Issues tab with the file URL (if it is public) and what you expected. We respond to issues and usually ship fixes quickly.

Only convert documents you have the right to access and process.