PDF to Text Markdown Extractor (Digital, No OCR)

Who it's for: Teams that need plain text or Markdown from digital (text-based) PDFs in batch — reports, manuals, filings — without an OCR bill.

What you get: Per-file text and/or Markdown, page count and basic metadata. Clear statuses for encrypted, empty and image-only/scanned PDFs (those are free).

Price: $0.004 per successfully extracted digital PDF + $0.003 once per run, charged only if at least one PDF was extracted. Scanned/image-only, empty, encrypted and failed files are free. 1,000 PDFs in one run = $4.003.

Point the Actor at direct HTTPS PDF URLs (or Apify file upload URLs). It downloads each file and extracts text locally with pypdf. No OCR in v1 — scanned/image-only PDFs return image_only and are not charged. No third-party extraction vendor.

Made by SteadyScrape (steady-scrape).

What you can do with it

1. Batch digital PDFs → text. Feed a list of direct PDF links and get one row per file.
2. Markdown for docs pipelines. Optional Markdown with light heading heuristics and page breaks.
3. Honest scanned handling. Image-only PDFs are labeled, not silently empty-charged.

Input

• pdfUrls (required): direct https links to PDF files.
• format: text | markdown | both (default).
• maxFiles: soft cap for this run (harder env cap may apply).
• includeMetadata: PDF title/author when present.

Example:

{
  "pdfUrls": ["https://www.orimi.com/pdf-test.pdf"],
  "format": "both",
  "maxFiles": 5
}

Under LIMITED_PERMISSIONS the Actor downloads URLs itself — HTML site crawls / request-queue site walking are out of scope.

Output

status	meaning	charged
ok	digital text extracted	yes (pdf-extracted)
empty	no pages/text	no
encrypted	password-protected	no
image_only	scanned / no extractable text (no OCR v1)	no
too_large / too_many_pages	over env caps	no
fetch_error / invalid / skipped	download/parse/max-charge	no

Pricing

pdf-extracted $0.004 per successful digital PDF + actor-start $0.003 once per run (only when at least one PDF was extracted), plus Apify's standard tiny per-run start event. Non-ok files are free. Set Maximum cost per run in Apify options.

Use cases

• RAG and search indexes: split the Markdown on headings and embed the chunks, keeping source for citations.
• Document archives: extract text and page counts from reports, manuals, filings and specs in batch.
• OCR triage: find which files in a batch are scanned (image_only) before paying for OCR elsewhere.

FAQ

Does it read scanned PDFs? No. There is no OCR in this version. Scanned or image-only files return image_only and are free. How good is the Markdown? Headings are detected heuristically (PDFs don't reliably mark them), and tables or multi-column layouts may come out as plain reading-order text. Can it find PDFs on a website for me? No. Give direct PDF links, or upload files in the Console. Password-protected files? They return encrypted and are free.

Worked cost example: 200 digital PDFs in one run = 200 × $0.004 + $0.003 ≈ $0.80.

Integrations

• Apify API and SDKs: call it from Python, JavaScript or any HTTP client and read results from the run's dataset.
• Schedules and webhooks: run it on a schedule in Apify and trigger your own endpoint when a run finishes.
• Make, Zapier, n8n: use Apify's own integrations for these tools to start runs and pass dataset rows on.
• AI agents (MCP): agents can call it through the Apify MCP server.

Limits (v1)

• No OCR. No vendor API.
• Env caps: max files/run, max pages/file, max bytes/file.
• Direct PDF URLs only (not “search this site for PDFs”).

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See every SteadyScrape (steady-scrape) Actor on our Apify profile.