Why extract the text
Quoting a passage, feeding a spreadsheet, indexing a corpus, translating content: as long as the text is locked inside the PDF, it stays hard to reuse. Extraction restores it as plain text, page by page.
Native text vs scans
The distinction matters: a PDF produced by a word processor contains a text layer that’s directly extractable. A scan is an image — the visible characters don’t exist as text. For those, local OCR is the mandatory step before extraction.
For richer structure
If you want more than plain text — headings, lists, tables — the Markdown export preserves the document’s structure rather than flat text alone.
Use cases
- Extract cited articles from a report for a bibliography.
- Feed a search engine or document corpus.
- Prepare a translation: extracted text → translation → new document.
- Verify a PDF’s textual content before distribution.
