How to Extract Bold Text from PDF in Python with PDF Extractor Web API

Step 1: Download the Python Code Sample

Download the complete PDF-to-XML Python sample using GitHub’s Download raw file button.

Install its dependency:

python -m pip install requests

Set API_KEY to your PDF.co API key. For files in your script’s folder, configure:

SourceFile = "sample.pdf" DestinationFile = "result.xml"

Place your source PDF in the same folder and run:

python ConvertPdfToXMLFromUploadedFile.py

Step 2: Extract Bold Text from the XML

The PDF-to-XML API returns text with font attributes, including fontStyle. Save this complete filtering script as extract_bold_text.py in the same folder:

from pathlib import Path
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

root = ET.parse("result.xml").getroot()
bold_text = []

for element in root.iter("text"):
    style = element.get("fontStyle", "")

    if "bold" in style.lower():
        text = "".join(element.itertext()).strip()
        if text:
            bold_text.append(text)

output = Path("bold-text.txt")
output.write_text("\n".join(bold_text), encoding="utf-8")

print(f"Saved {len(bold_text)} bold text entries to {output}")

After the conversion finishes, run:

python extract_bold_text.py

Open bold-text.txt to review the extracted text. This filter selects entries marked as bold in the XML, including combined styles such as bold italic.