Information Extraction: How to Extract Text, Data, Page, and Image from PDF

Many reports, research papers, and datasets are distributed as PDFs. Manually going through hundreds of pages to find relevant information is extremely tedious and time-consuming.

Want to know how to extract information from a PDF? The post gives a detailed guide on how to do each kind of extraction. It’s helpful for anyone who wants to get information from PDFs for school, work, or personal use.

Extract Text from PDF Image

PDFgear is a free AI PDF editor, offering lots of advanced PDF editing tools that allow users to replace, remove, and add any text in a PDF.

With its built-in OCR feature, PDFgear can help you extract text from image-based PDFs, even if you can’t select it. It works in over 10 languages like English, French, and Italian. You can also select any part of a PDF page to extract text using OCR.

Step 1. Open a Scanned Document

Open the PDFgear application on your computer. If you haven’t installed it yet, download and install PDFgear from its official website.

Once PDFgear is launched, click on the ‘Open File‘ option in the main interface. Browse and select the PDF file containing a scanned image to open it in PDFgear.

Step 2. Activate OCR Feature

Look for the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature, which is typically located in the “Home” tab.

Click on the “OCR” feature to activate the text recognition functionality.

Step 3. Extract Text from Image

Using your mouse, click and drag to highlight/select the text areas within the PDF image that you want to extract text from.

Release the mouse button once you’ve selected the desired text. The selected text should be outlined or highlighted.

Click on the “Done” button or a similar option to confirm your text selection and proceed

Step 4. Copy or Save Extracted Text

After selecting text and configuring OCR settings (if applicable), choose how you want to handle the extracted text:

Copy to Clipboard: Click on the “Copy” button to copy the extracted text to the clipboard. You can then paste it into a text editor or any other application.

Save as Text File (TXT): If you prefer to save the extracted text as a separate file, click on the “Save” button. Specify the file name and location where you want to save the text file. Then, click “Save” to save the extracted text as a TXT file.

Extract Invoice Data from PDF

When you manually input data into the invoice database software, it takes a lot of time, and there might be some errors during the data entry process.

Tabula is a tool designed to automatically extract data from PDF files using AI and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. It is specifically designed to handle tables within PDFs, making it a good choice for extracting structured data such as invoice details.

Step 1. Download and Install Tabula

Go to the Tabula website and download the version of Tabula that’s compatible with your operating system (Windows, Mac, or Linux).

Follow the on-screen instructions to install Tabula on your computer.

Step 2. Upload the Invoice PDF in Tabula

Launch the application: Open Tabula. It typically runs in your web browser as a local server (e.g., http://127.0.0.1:8080/).

Look for an option to “Browse” on Tabula’s main page. Click this icon, find your PDF invoice file, and upload it.

Step 3. Select the Data to Extract

Once you’ve uploaded your PDF, Tabula will show what’s inside. Just use your mouse to draw a box around the table or info you want from the invoice. If the invoice is on more than one page, you can pick what you need from each page.

Once you’ve chosen, you can check if the info is right. Tabula lets you get the data in different ways, like CSV or Excel. Click the “Extract Data” button and pick the format you want.

Step 4. Save or Export the Data

Once extracted, you can save or export the data to your computer. If you chose CSV, you can open the file in any spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets for further processing.

Extract Metadata from PDF

PDF metadata refers to information stored within a PDF file that details the document, such as its title, author, subject, and keywords.

Adobe Acrobat allows you to view and sometimes edit the metadata of a PDF file. This is the simplest way for users to access metadata without programming.

Here are some steps for extracting PDF metadata:

Step 1. Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat.

Step 2. Access the Document Properties via the File menu.

Step 3. View metadata in the Description tab, where you can see fields like Title, Author, Subject, and Keywords.

Step 4. Extract the desired information by selecting and copying the text.

Save the extracted metadata in a text document or note app for future reference.

Extract Pages from PDF

For those who need to extract specific pages from an existing PDF document to create a new, more refined version of the original document. PDFgear offers a PDF splitter tool to split a PDF file by page ranges or extract all PDF pages to multiple PDF files.

Here is how to extract PDF pages and create multiple PDFs from one:

Step 1. First, download and install PDFgear on your Windows or Mac. Launch Adobe Acrobat DC on your computer.

Open the PDF file from which you want to extract pages by clicking on “Open File” and selecting the PDF document.

Step 2. Once your PDF is open, click on the “Page” tab on the top menubar.

Under the “Pages” tab, you’ll see options for manipulating your PDF pages, including extracting them.

Step 3. You can select the pages you want to extract. You can click on individual pages, or click select multiple pages.

Step 4. After selecting the pages, click the “Extract Pages” button under the “Pages” tab.

A new dialog box will appear, giving you the option to extract the selected pages as a separate PDF file. You can also delete the selected pages from the original document after extracting by checking the “Delete selected pages after extraction” option.

Click “OK” to extract the selected pages into a new PDF document.

Step 5. You will automatically jump to the File Explorer. From there, you can choose to save the extracted PDF pages to your desired location and specify a file name for the new document

Extract Images from PDF

Images embedded in PDFs are not permanently fixed and can be extracted for use elsewhere. Whether you need a single image or multiple images from a document, you can use software tools to extract them easily.

By using a PDF image extractor, the images are extracted in their original format and quality. And there are no watermarks added to the extracted images.

Follow these steps to extract images for a PDF in bulk:

Step 1. Open your web browser and navigate to PDF Candy’s Extract Images page.

Step 2. You can upload the PDF file from which you want to extract images in several ways:

Simply drag the PDF file from your computer and drop it into the designated area on the webpage.

Click on the “ADD FILE” button to open a file dialog box, then navigate to and select the PDF file you wish to use.

If your PDF is stored in Google Drive or Dropbox, you can upload it directly from these services by clicking on the respective icons.

Step 3. Once you’ve uploaded the PDF, PDF Candy will automatically start the process of extracting images from the PDF document. There’s no need for you to do anything during this step; the tool handles everything.

Step 4. After the extraction process is complete, PDF Candy will provide you with a ZIP archive containing all the images extracted from the PDF.

Click on the “Download” button to save the ZIP file to your computer.

If you prefer, you can also save individual images by previewing them and selecting specific ones for download.

FAQs

How to extract information from a PDF using Python?

Python has a few libraries for dealing with PDFs, like PyPDF2, PDFMiner, and PyMuPDF. You can use these to get text, info about the file, and sometimes even pictures from PDFs. The library you choose depends on what your project needs, like if you need to keep the text format detailed, get images out, or make sure things run fast.

Is it possible to extract tables from PDF documents?

Yes, extracting tables from PDF documents can be done using Tabula, Camelot, and ExtractTable. These tools analyze the structure of the PDF and attempt to recognize and extract tabular data into formats like CSV or Excel, making it easier to work with the data.

How to extract a summary from a PDF with AI?

PDFgear has an AI tool that can help you summarize a PDF with ease. Open a PDF in PDFgear after downloading and installing this software. Click the Copilot icon to open the AI tool. Send the command to ask the Copilot to summarize your PDF. You will get a summary within seconds.

Conclusion

PDFs store valuable text, data, metadata, pages, and images that can be extracted using various methods, from manual to automated AI parsers. These methods mentioned in this post provide straightforward solutions for extracting information from PDFs for future use.

PDFgear is one of the best AI editing software. It provides various tools for extracting information such as text, pages, and summaries from PDFs. Download it to try out its features and streamline your PDF workflow.