PDF to Text Converter: Plain Text per Page, No Start Fee

PDF to text, page by page: paste public PDF links and get the plain text of every page, plus one full-text .txt file per PDF.

Each page becomes one row with the page number, the text and its character count, so you can search, filter or feed the text to an LLM page by page. Next to the rows, every PDF gets a .txt file with all its pages and a download link. No tables, no OCR, no layout guessing — just the text layer of the PDF, fast and cheap.

Try it free: leave the input empty and press Start — a small public PDF is converted (not charged, rows carry _demo: true).

What you get

url	page	text	charCount	scanned	textFileUrl
https://example.com/annual-report.pdf	1	Annual Report 2025\nRevenue grew 12% ...	2,814	false	https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/…/records/001-annual-report.txt
https://example.com/annual-report.pdf	2	Letter from the CEO\nDear shareholders ...	3,102	false	(same file)
https://example.com/annual-report.pdf	3		0	true	(same file)
https://example.com/missing.pdf	0		0	false	error: http_404

(illustrative rows showing the output format; the free demo shows real results)

• One row per page: url, page (1-based), text, charCount, scanned, textFileUrl, error.
• One .txt file per PDF in the run's key-value store (001-annual-report.txt, 002-…): all extracted pages in order, separated by a form-feed character (\f, the same page break pdftotext uses). The link is in every row of that PDF and in the STATS record.
• Scanned pages are free: a page that is only an image has no text layer; it comes back with empty text, scanned: true and is not charged. This Actor does not run OCR.

How to use

1. PDF URLs: public links to PDF files, one per line (up to 500 per run).
2. Optional Pages: a range such as 1-5,8, 3- (page 3 to the end) or -2 (the first two pages), applied to every PDF.
3. Optional Max pages per PDF (default 200, up to 2,000).

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tests/xhtml/testfiles/resources/pdf/dummy.pdf",
    "https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf"
  ],
  "pages": "1-2",
  "maxPagesPerPdf": 200
}

Output fields

• url — the PDF link you gave.
• page — page number (1-based); 0 on the single row of a PDF that could not be read.
• text — the page's text, with line breaks kept and surrounding white space trimmed.
• charCount — number of characters in text.
• scanned — true when the page has images but no text (a scan); false for text pages and blank pages.
• textFileUrl — download link of the PDF's full-text .txt file (empty when no page had text).
• error — null, or why the PDF or page failed: http_404, not_a_pdf, file_too_large, timeout, encrypted, unreadable_pdf, blocked_private_address, invalid_url, page_failed:….
• STATS record: per PDF the page count, pages extracted, pages with text, pages charged, scanned pages, the .txt file and any error.

Limits (cannot be raised by input)

• Up to 500 PDFs per run, each up to 50 MB, downloaded once within 60 seconds, following at most 5 redirects.
• Up to 2,000 pages per PDF (maxPagesPerPdf, default 200).
• Public files only: no login, no cookies. Password-protected PDFs return encrypted. Links to internal network addresses are blocked.
• Set a maximum charge per run to cap spend: the Actor checks it before it starts, stops cleanly when it is reached and keeps the pages read so far.
• Very long jobs: dense pages take a fraction of a second each; for thousands of pages per run, raise the run timeout (default 1 hour).

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.0005 per extracted page — a page that contains text. That is $0.50 per 1,000 pages; a 10-page PDF costs half a cent. No start fee and no per-file fee. Blank pages, scanned (image-only) pages, PDFs that fail to download or open, and the demo are free. Store discounts apply automatically: BRONZE −10%, SILVER −20%, GOLD −30%. On the Apify Free plan, the $5 of monthly platform credit covers about 10,000 pages a month.

FAQ

Does it read scanned PDFs? No. Scans have no text layer and need OCR, which this Actor does not do. Those pages are flagged scanned: true and cost nothing, so you can see which documents need OCR.

Does it extract tables? No — table cells come out as plain text lines in reading order. If you need tables as rows and cells, use the PDF Extractor Actor from the same developer.

Why is the text order sometimes odd? The text is read from the PDF's own text layer. Multi-column layouts and text in floating boxes are put in reading order line by line, which can mix columns on some documents.

Can I give a local file? Upload it somewhere public first (for example an Apify key-value store or any file host) and paste the link.

Who owns the text? The rights stay with the owners of the documents. Only process PDFs you are allowed to use.

If this Actor saved you time, a rating on the Store helps others find it.

More tools from the same developer

• PDF Extractor — PDF to text, tables and metadata from public PDF URLs, page by page
• OCR Image to Text — OCR for image URLs and scanned PDFs with built-in Tesseract: text, confidence and line boxes in 8 languages
• RAG Chunker — split scraped pages into chunks for RAG and vector stores