How to Extract Text from a PDF Using PDF.co and Zapier
This tutorial shows how to automatically extract text from a PDF using PDF.co and Zapier. It works with ordinary PDFs, multi-column documents, and scanned PDFs that require OCR.
The Zap uses:
- Google Drive — New File in Folder
- PDF.co — PDF to Anything Converter
- Google Drive — Upload File
Step 1: Add the Google Drive Trigger
Create a Zap and select Google Drive as the trigger app.
Choose New File in Folder, connect your Google account, and select the folder where PDF files will be added.
Test the trigger and select a sample PDF.
Step 2: Add the PDF.co Conversion
Add another step and select PDF.co.
Choose PDF to Anything Converter, click Sign in, and authorize Zapier to access your PDF.co account.
Configure the action:
- Output Format: Select Plain Text.
- Source PDF URL: Map the File value from Google Drive.
- Page Selection: Leave blank to extract every page. Page indexes begin at
0, so enter0to process only the first page. - Output File Name: Enter a name such as
extracted-text.txt. - Inline Output Option: Set to
falsewhen you want a downloadable text file. Set totruewhen the extracted text will be mapped directly into another Zapier action. - OCR Language for Scanned Documents: Select the document’s language when processing scanned PDFs.
- Enable Line Grouping: Enable this when text should be grouped into rows or columns.
- Unwrap: Enable this only when line grouping is enabled and wrapped lines should be combined.
Leave Custom Profiles blank unless the document requires advanced extraction settings.
See the PDF to Anything documentation for all current fields and text-extraction options.
Step 3: Test the Extraction
Test the PDF.co action.
If inline output is disabled, open the returned URL and review the generated text file. If inline output is enabled, review the extracted content in the action’s output data.
Confirm that the text appears in the expected reading order. For multi-column documents, test the line-grouping setting to determine which output best suits the document’s layout.
Step 4: Save the Text File
To save the extracted text, add Google Drive — Upload File.
Select the destination folder and map the PDF.co output URL into the file field. Use the output name from PDF.co or enter a descriptive .txt file name.
Step 5: Activate the Zap
Publish the Zap after testing the complete workflow. New PDFs added to the source folder will now be converted into text files automatically.
In this tutorial, you learned how to extract text from a PDF file using PDF.co and Zapier. You also learned how to set up the PDF to Anything Converter module which supports PDF to Text, XLS, CSV, JSON, XML, and Images formats.
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