How to extract text from PDF?

Jerry van de Bunt

Hi everyone,

How can I extract text from a PDF file? 😁

ChrisW67

Welcome to the forum.

Assuming you want to do this using Qt then there's no out-of-the-box way to achieve this.

How you go about it depends on what you are doing this for, how you want to handle non-text content, how you want to handle layout, what platform you are on, ...

You might get away with something like Ghostscript:
gs -sDEVICE=txtwrite -o output.txt input.pdf
(or a Windows equivalent)

SGaist

Hi and welcome to devnet,

Another option is to convert your pdf to images and use something like tesseract to do OCR on them.

hskoglund

Hi, on Ubuntu there's pdftotext (a.k.a. poppler-utils).

Also there's a QPdfDocument class which has a getAllText() function. However it looks like you have to compile/build QPdfDocument yourself, i..e it's not included in the Qt installer.