N
Glam Journal

How do I convert a PDF to text in Python?

Author

William Burgess

Updated on March 07, 2026

How do I convert a PDF to text in Python?

Steps to Convert PDF to TXT in Python

  1. Open a new Word document.
  2. Type in some content of your choice in the word document.
  3. Now to File > Print > Save.
  4. Remember to save your pdf file in the same location where you save your python script file.
  5. Now your . pdf file is created and saved which you will later convert into a .

How do I read text from a PDF in Python?

Let us try to understand the above code in chunks:

  1. pdfFileObj = open(‘example.pdf’, ‘rb’) We opened the example.
  2. pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdfFileObj)
  3. print(pdfReader.numPages)
  4. pageObj = pdfReader.getPage(0)
  5. print(pageObj.extractText())
  6. pdfFileObj.close()

How do I create a Python PDF reader?

PDF Viewer for Python Tkinter

  1. Install the requirement by typing.
  2. Import filedialog to create a dialog box for selecting the file from the local directory.
  3. Create a Text Widget and add some Menus to it like Open, Clear, and Quit.
  4. Define a function for each Menu.
  5. Define a function to open the file.

Can Python read a PDF file?

It can retrieve text and metadata from PDFs as well as merge entire files together. Tabula-py is a simple Python wrapper of tabula-java, which can read the table of PDF. You can read tables from PDF and convert into pandas’ DataFrame. tabula-py also enables you to convert a PDF file into CSV/TSV/JSON file.

How do I convert a PDF to a text file?

Save the whole document as a text file

  1. Open the PDF saved to your computer using Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader software.
  2. Click File > Save as.
  3. Click the ‘Save as type’ drop-down list and select the file format you want to save as (e.g. Word.
  4. Choose where on your computer you want to save the file and click Save.

Can we convert PDF to Word in Python?

python-docx is another library that is used by pdf2docx for creating and updating Microsoft Word (. docx) files. The convert_pdf2docx() function allows you to specify a range of pages to convert, it converts a PDF file into a Docx file and prints a summary of the conversion process in the end.

How can I text a PDF?

Add new text

  1. Select Tools > Edit PDF > Add Text .
  2. Drag to define the width of the text block you want to add.
  3. For vertical text, right-click the text box, and choose Make Text Direction Vertical.
  4. The Add text tool intelligently detects the following text properties of text close to the point of click:
  5. Type the text.

How do you extract text from a PDF?

To extract information from a PDF in Acrobat DC, choose Tools > Export PDF and select an option. To extract text, export the PDF to a Word format or rich text format, and choose from several advanced options that include: Retain Flowing Text.

How can I take text from a PDF?

What is Textract in Python?

This is the core function used for extracting text. It routes the filename to the appropriate parser and returns the extracted text as a byte-string encoded with encoding . Importantly, the textract. parsers. Decode text using the chardet package.

How do I convert PDF to text?

Open a PDF file containing a scanned image in Acrobat for Mac or PC. Click on the “Edit PDF” tool in the right pane. Acrobat automatically applies optical character recognition (OCR) to your document and converts it to a fully editable copy of your PDF. Click the text element you wish to edit and start typing.

How does Python work with PDF files?

You can work with a preexisting PDF in Python by using the PyPDF2 package. PyPDF2 is a pure-Python package that you can use for many different types of PDF operations….In this tutorial, you learned how to do the following:

  1. Extract metadata from a PDF.
  2. Rotate pages.
  3. Merge and split PDFs.
  4. Add watermarks.
  5. Add encryption.

How do I work with a PDF in Python?

You can work with a preexisting PDF in Python by using the PyPDF2 package. PyPDF2 is a pure-Python package that you can use for many different types of PDF operations. By the end of this article, you’ll know how to do the following: Extract document information from a PDF in Python

How does pypdf2 handle text data?

As stated in the PyPDF2 documentation, all text data is returned in the order they are provided in the content stream of the page, and relying on it may lead to some surprises. This mainly depends on the internal structure of the PDF document, and how the stream of PDF instructions was produced by the PDF writer process.

What is the best PDF extractor for Python?

Based on our research these are the candidates that are up-to-date: PyPDF2: A Python library to extract document information and content, split documents page-by-page, merge documents, crop pages, and add watermarks. PyPDF2 supports both unencrypted and encrypted documents. PDFMiner: Is written entirely in Python, and works well for Python 2.4.

What will I learn in the PDF manipulation course?

In Part One we will focus on the manipulation of existing PDFs. You will learn how to read and extract the content (both text and images), rotate single pages, and split documents into its individual pages. Part Two will cover adding a watermark based on overlays.