PDF ToolsLesson 308Free preview

PDF to Text

This lesson is part of Web Developer Tools · All levels

Summary

PDF to text extracts text characters from PDF documents into a plain text file. This only works on PDFs that have a text layer, which is digital text that is stored as characters. The resulting PDFs are usually images, so OCR is required before they can be converted into text. The layout of columns and tables may change because the order of text reading is not always the same as the page appearance.

Key points

Text extraction only works on PDFs with a text layer
The scanner's PDFs require OCR to recognize letters
Tables and columns can lose structure when they become plain text
The reading sequence can be different from the visual sequence of the page
Save the result as UTF-8 so that the special characters are not corrupted

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