PDF to Text & Markdown – Extract Text, Tables & Metadata

📄 PDF to Text & Markdown – Extract Text, Tables & Metadata

Turn any PDF link into clean text, LLM-ready Markdown, tables and metadata in seconds. Paste PDF URLs, or a web page that links to PDFs, and get one structured row per document, ready to export as JSON, CSV or Excel. No login, no uploads, no setup.

✨ Why use PDF to Text & Markdown?

• ⚡ Fast – text extraction runs on PDFium; 10 PDFs with 100 pages finish in about 10 seconds, a 1,300-page document in under a minute.
• 🤖 LLM- and RAG-ready Markdown – headings, paragraphs, bold labels and bullet lists are rebuilt from the PDF layout, with --- between pages.
• 📊 Tables – ruled tables come back as rows of cells and as Markdown tables.
• 🔗 Crawls pages for PDFs – give it a web page and it extracts every PDF linked there (up to your limit).
• 🧾 Full metadata – title, author, subject, keywords, creator, producer, creation and modification dates (UTC), PDF version, page size.
• 💸 Cheap and fair – you pay per extracted document, never for failed downloads.

🎯 Use cases

• 🧠 AI and RAG pipelines – feed reports, papers and manuals into vector databases as Markdown or per-page chunks.
• 📚 Research – pull the text of academic papers, government reports and whitepapers in bulk.
• ⚖️ Legal and compliance – extract filings, contracts, policies and forms for search and review.
• 💼 Finance – read annual reports, fund factsheets and statements; grab their tables.
• 🔎 Monitoring – schedule a run on a page that publishes PDFs (tenders, press releases, price lists) and get the new documents' text.
• 🗂️ Archiving and search – index document libraries with metadata and full text.

🚀 How to use

1. Paste one or more PDF URLs (or web pages that link to PDFs) into PDF URLs or web pages.
2. Pick the output: Markdown, plain text, per-page text, tables, one row per document or per page.
3. Optionally set a page range, a password for protected PDFs, or limits.
4. Click Start and download the results as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or read them through the API.

📥 Input

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf",
    "https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762"
  ],
  "includeMarkdown": true,
  "extractTables": true,
  "pageRange": "1-10"
}

📤 Output

Example row (text shortened):

{
  "url": "https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf",
  "fileName": "fw9.pdf",
  "title": "Form W-9 (Rev. March 2024)",
  "author": "SE:W:CAR:MP",
  "subject": "Request for Taxpayer Identification Number and Certification",
  "keywords": "Fillable",
  "creator": "Designer 6.5",
  "producer": "Designer 6.5",
  "creationDate": "2024-03-06T13:18:13.000Z",
  "modificationDate": "2024-03-06T13:18:13.000Z",
  "pdfVersion": "1.7",
  "pageCount": 6,
  "pageWidthPt": 612.0,
  "pageHeightPt": 792.0,
  "isEncrypted": false,
  "fileSizeBytes": 140815,
  "extractedPageCount": 6,
  "charCount": 37689,
  "wordCount": 6272,
  "textExtractionStatus": "text_extracted",
  "warning": null,
  "error": null,
  "fullText": "Form W-9\n(Rev. March 2024)\nRequest for Taxpayer\nIdentification Number and Certification\n...",
  "markdown": "Form W-9 (Rev. March 2024)\n\n# Request for Taxpayer Identification Number and Certification\n\n...",
  "pages": [{ "pageNumber": 1, "text": "Form W-9\n(Rev. March 2024)\n..." }]
}

💰 Pricing

You pay $1.50 per 1,000 extracted PDFs ($0.0015 per document), whatever the page count, plus normal platform usage: compute time and the datacenter traffic of the downloads ($1 per GB). There is no start fee. Failed downloads, invalid URLs and files that are not PDFs are free.

Example from a test run: 10 PDFs (5.5 MB, 100 pages) cost $0.024 in total: $0.015 in document fees plus about $0.009 of compute and download traffic. 1,000 typical PDFs cost roughly $2–3 in total.

❓ FAQ

Is it legal? Extracting text from PDFs you are allowed to access is legal. Respect copyright and the terms of the sites you download from.

Do I need a login or proxy? No. Downloads use datacenter proxies by default. Files behind a login are not supported.

Does it read scanned PDFs? It reads the embedded text layer. Scanned (image-only) pages are flagged with textExtractionStatus: "no_text" or listed in emptyPageNumbers so you can route them to OCR.

How big can a PDF be? Up to 100 MB by default (raise maxFileSizeMb up to 500 MB). Very long documents are split across fields so each row stays under the dataset size limit; use per-page rows or a page range for huge files.

Why is a field empty? Many PDFs have no title, author or keywords in their metadata; those fields are then null.

Can I schedule it or use the API? Yes. Schedule runs, call it through the API, or connect it to your workflows with webhooks.

⚠️ Limits

• No OCR: image-only pages are detected and reported, not converted to text.
• Table detection finds tables drawn with lines; borderless tables stay in the text.
• Markdown structure is inferred from font sizes and layout; complex multi-column layouts may need light cleanup.
• PDFs that need a login, cookies or a captcha cannot be downloaded.