In application #

To extract pages from a PDF in SumatraPDF:

open PDF document
Ctrl + k for command palette
Extract Text From Document

Or:

open PDF document
right-click for context menu
Document > Extract Text From Document

This extract text from the document and saves it as a text file.

You can also extract from all pages or select a subset of pages.

From command-line #

You can use SumatraPDF cmd-line to extract text from a PDF file.

Extract all text from PDF #

SumatraPDF convert -o output.txt input.pdf

Extract text from selected pages of a PDF #

SumatraPDF convert -o output.txt input.pdf 1-3,4,8-9

This will extract text from pages 1,2,3,4,8,9.

Structured text #

PDF files don’t really contain text. It’s made of glyphs (characters) in a given font positioned at (x,y) position in a page.

Extracting text is based on heuristics i.e. the program tries to guess words and lines based on position of characters.

Structured text is detailed information about every character on the page:

font
glyph
(x,y) position on page
bounding box (area) of the glyph

For example, in XML format it looks like:

<font name="CharisSIL" size="7.9701">
<char quad="187.4652 295.9985 191.96033 295.9985 187.4652 301.9683 191.96033 301.9683" x="187.4652" y="301.871" bidi="0" color="#000000" alpha="#ff" flags="16" c="d"/>

Here it shows that letter d in font CharisSIL is at a given x/y position in the page.

You can use this output in your custom processing program.

Extract structured text from PDF in XML format #

SumatraPDF draw -o foo.stext foo.pdf

Extract structured text from PDF in JSON format #

SumatraPDF draw -o foo.stext.json -F stext.json foo.pdf

It’s the same information but in JSON format.

SumatraPDF documentation

Extract text from PDF using SumatraPDF