In this tutorial, you'll learn **how to extract text from PDF files using Python** — a must-have skill for anyone working with documents, data scraping, or automating workflows involving PDFs.
PDFs are everywhere — invoices, reports, articles, books — and being able to programmatically pull text from them opens the door to **searching**, **indexing**, **summarizing**, or even converting PDFs to other formats (like CSV or TXT). Whether you're a data analyst, developer, or automator, this guide will get you started with ease.
---
### ✅ What You'll Learn:
🔹 How to install the required libraries for PDF reading
🔹 How to extract text from simple and complex PDFs
🔹 Difference between text-based and scanned/image-based PDFs
🔹 Handling multi-page PDFs and extracting specific pages
🔹 Tips to clean and process extracted text
---
### 🔧 Tools & Libraries Covered:
- [`PyPDF2`]( – lightweight, pure Python library for reading PDFs
- [`pdfplumber`]( – best for accurate text layout extraction
- [`PyMuPDF` / `fitz`]( – fast and powerful, handles both text and images
- [`Tesseract`]( – for OCR if your PDF is scanned
---
### 🧪 Sample Workflow:
```python
# Using PyPDF2
import PyPDF2
with open("example.pdf", "rb") as file:
reader = PyPDF2.PdfReader(file)
for page in reader.pages:
print(page.extract_text())
```
```python
# Using pdfplumber for better layout
import pdfplumber
with pdfplumber.open("example.pdf") as pdf:
for page in pdf.pages:
pri
|