PDF Text Extractor with OCR (Scanned PDFs)

Extracts text from any PDF, page by page. Digital pages are read straight from the text layer (fast and cheap); scanned or image-only pages are automatically run through Tesseract OCR. Output is one row per page with the text and word count, plus optional fixed-size chunks ready for embeddings and RAG pipelines.

Features

• OCR modes: auto (only where needed), always, or never
• OCR languages: English, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German
• Page ranges like 1-5,9
• Optional text chunks (set a chunk size in characters) for LLM / vector-database ingestion
• Bulk PDF URLs, files up to 50 MB

Use cases

Feeding PDFs to AI and RAG systems, searching scanned archives, extracting contracts, letters and old reports, preparing documents for translation.

Input example

{
  "pdfUrls": [
    "https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf"
  ],
  "pages": "1"
}

Output example

{
  "pdfUrl": "https://example.com/scan.pdf",
  "page": 1,
  "pageCount": 1,
  "method": "ocr",
  "words": 49,
  "text": "Invoice number: 2026-0457\nInvoice date: 03/10/2026 ...",
  "status": "ok"
}

Pricing

Pay per event, so you pay only for results.

• $0.001 per text page (digital pages read from the text layer)
• $0.004 per OCR page (scanned or image-only pages)

In auto mode OCR only runs on pages that need it, so you pay the cheaper rate wherever possible. PDFs that fail to download are not charged.

There is also Apify's standard run-start fee of $0.00005 per GB of run memory (a fraction of a cent per run). The exact prices are always shown on the Pricing tab. You can cap any run with the Maximum cost per run setting.

Use it from code or no-code tools

Every run can be started from the Apify API, the Apify Python/JS clients, or connected to n8n, Make, Zapier and Google Sheets through Apify integrations. Results download as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML.

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("tidyfold/pdf-text-ocr").call(run_input={'pdfUrls': ['https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf'], 'pages': '1'})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

Support

Found a bug or need a field added? Open an issue on the Issues tab. Tidyfold maintains these tools daily and usually replies within 1 business day.