How to Extract Text from PDF in Python | PDF Text Extraction Tutorial (2025)

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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