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.