DocuShell
DocuShell logoPProduct Hunt1 month Pro free, limited slotsReserve free Pro

pdf-extract

PDF to Plain text

Use DocuShell's Parse PDF API to strip a PDF into the plain-text output variant, with reading-order recovery for consumers that do not need structure.

Open Parse PDF toolAPI hub

Format facts

Source MIME
application/pdf
Target MIME
text/plain
Max input size
50 MB
Typical output size
0.01-0.05x input size
Lossy?
Yes, see quirks
Backed by
parse-pdf
Availability
Live public API
Endpoint
POST /api/v1/parse

How the conversion runs

  1. Step 1. POST the PDF to /api/v1/parse with formats=text; the same PDF guard used by Markdown extraction applies.
  2. Step 2. The worker clusters blocks but emits only raw text in recovered reading order.
  3. Step 3. The response can be consumed as a lightweight UTF-8 stream for search, indexing or diffing.

API example

curl -X POST https://api.docushell.com/api/v1/parse \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DOCUSHELL_API_KEY" \
  -F "[email protected]" \
  -F "formats=text"

Submit returns a queued job with job_id. Poll GET /api/v1/jobs/{id}, then download with GET /api/v1/jobs/{id}/download.

Format-specific quirks

  • Ligatures are unfolded into plain characters so the output is grep-friendly.
  • Soft hyphens at line ends are removed and surrounding words are rejoined.
  • Running headers and footers may be stripped when they repeat in the same page position.

Frequently asked questions

Is OCR included?

No. Scanned PDFs without a text layer need OCR before text extraction.

How are tables represented?

Plain text output serializes table-like content row by row; use Markdown or JSON when structure matters.

Is the response streamed?

The text variant is designed for lightweight downstream consumption as soon as parsing completes.

Related conversions

PDF to MarkdownUse DocuShell's Parse PDF API to extract a PDF into the Markdown output variant, with detected headings, tables and ordered lists for RAG indexes or LLM context.PDF to Word documentRecover editable Word output from a PDF by reconstructing paragraphs, lists, tables and inline images into Office Open XML.Web page to PDFCapture a live web page as a PDF after JavaScript execution and asset load, with strict SSRF guards that block private and metadata address ranges.