Extracting Text from PDF Files with Python: A Comprehensive Guide

In the age of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their wide-ranging applications, from simple text summarisation and translation to predicting stock performance based on sentiment and financial report topics, the importance of text data has never been greater.

There are many types of documents that share this kind of unstructured information, from web articles and blog posts to handwritten letters and poems. However, a significant portion of this text data is stored and transferred in PDF format. More specifically, it has been found that over 2 billion PDFs are opened in Outlook each year, while 73 million new PDF files are saved in Google Drive and email daily (2).

Developing, therefore, a more systematic way to process these documents and extract information from them would give us the ability to have an automated flow and better understand and utilise this vast volume of textual data. And for this task, of course, our best friend could be none other than Python.

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