A command-line tool to extract clean, readable text from massive PDFs (like the 5000-page Bible or medical documents). Supports both native PDF extraction and OCR using Tesseract for scanned/image-based PDFs.
PDFs—especially scanned books or health records—are often difficult to convert into useful text formats. This tool solves that by:
- Extracting embedded text where possible using PyMuPDF
- Falling back to OCR via Tesseract for scanned images
- Dumping everything into a plain
.txtfile
- Windows 10, 11, or Server 2022/2025
- Winget (built into Windows) for package installation
- Admin rights for setup
- Python 3.11, Git, and Tesseract (installed automatically)
- Winget: Native to Windows. Eliminates the need for external package managers like Chocolatey.
- Python 3.11: Modern, faster, and fully compatible with the tool's dependencies.
- Git: Makes downloading and maintaining this project dead simple.
- Tesseract: OCR engine used to extract text from image-based PDF pages.
git clone https://github.com/yourusername/pdf-to-txt-extractor.git
cd pdf-to-txt-extractor