Convert PDF to plain TXT

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Hi,

With Adobe Acrobat Pro, I am able to convert a PDF into a plain TXT format.

I would like to do this conversion via an API. In the Adobe PDF Services documentation, there is only an option to convert to RTF, not TXT.

I was wondering if there was a way to convert a PDF to plain TXT using an API service.

Thanks!

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Joel Geraci

Community Expert

You can use the Extract API to get a JSON representation of the PDF then filter it to get only the text elements. From there you can output plain text.

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P

peach11Author

Participant

Thanks for your reply!

When I convert the PDF to text via Acrobat Pro, it orders the text in a way that is useful to me -- the rows of the tables are formatted in paragraphs of text. I've attached a sample output PDF and TXT file. I don't think it would be possible to retain this format when using JSON.

This seems like a really roundabout way to complete a simple task. Why does the API not support plain text? It would be really useful to us.

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Aetna5000_(1).txt

Aetna5000_(3).pdf

Joel Geraci

Community Expert

The usefulness of the JSON really depends on your goals. I find the output from Extract to be far more useful than plain text because I can easily format it into whatever I need. Also, tables are both represented as tables in the JSON similar to how HTML does and it can also output them as either .csv or .xslx.

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