Text is the new gold.

Plain text, or perhaps markdown is the new gold, especially in the context of Generative AI. Extracting text from PDF files is a common task that can be accomplished using Python libraries like pdfplumber. Microsoft released MarkItDown a python library to extract LLM ready text format.

Nothing beats a folder of markdown files with some front matter that an LLM or SSG (Like this site’s use of Jekyll) can use to generate content or format it for human consumption.

Extracting Text from PDFs Extracting text from PDFs involves reading the document and parsing its content. With pdfplumber, this process is straightforward:​

    import pdfplumber

    def extract_text_from_pdf(pdf_path):
        with pdfplumber.open(pdf_path) as pdf:
            all_text = []
            for page in pdf.pages:
                text = page.extract_text()
                if text:
                    all_text.append(text)
        return '\n'.join(all_text)

    pdf_path = 'sample.pdf'
    extracted_text = extract_text_from_pdf(pdf_path)
    print(extracted_text)

In this function:

The PDF is opened using pdfplumber.open(). Each page is iterated over, and extract_text() retrieves the textual content. The extracted text from all pages is combined into a single string.

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