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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchUse Apache PDFBox’s PDFTextStripper to extract a PDF’s text, then write the result to a .txt file with an explicit charset such as UTF-8. The key choices are handling passwords and extraction permissions, and deciding whether to sort text by page position to improve reading order.
Convert a PDF to TXT with PDFBox
Add Apache PDFBox to your Java project, then load the PDF, check whether extraction is permitted, extract the text, and write it to a file. The code below uses PDFBox’s current Loader API and closes the document automatically:
import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Path;
import org.apache.pdfbox.Loader;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.text.PDFTextStripper;
public class PdfToText {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
Path input = Path.of("input.pdf");
Path output = Path.of("output.txt");
try (PDDocument document = Loader.loadPDF(input.toFile())) {
if (!document.getCurrentAccessPermission().canExtractContent()) {
throw new IllegalStateException("PDF extraction permission is denied");
}
PDFTextStripper stripper = new PDFTextStripper();
stripper.setSortByPosition(true);
String text = stripper.getText(document);
Files.writeString(output, text, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
}
}
}PDFTextStripper extracts text while ignoring much of the PDF’s formatting, and getText(document) returns the extracted content as a string. PDFTextStripper API documentation describes its behavior and methods.
The example’s imports use the Loader API. Use the loading method documented for the PDFBox version in your project; older releases may have different loading APIs. The official PDFBox examples demonstrate loading a document, checking its access permission, extracting text, and closing the document.
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Choose the text reading order
PDFs are laid out as graphics, so their internal content-stream order may not match the order a person would read the page. By default, PDFBox follows content-stream order. Calling stripper.setSortByPosition(true) requests sorting by page position, from left to right and top to bottom. The PDFBox FAQ notes that some multi-column layouts work better with sorting disabled.
Try both settings on representative pages when extracting a document with columns, sidebars, or complex layouts. Check whether headings and paragraphs stay in the intended sequence; positional sorting is an option, not a guarantee of perfect reading order.
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Handle passwords and extraction permissions
The code checks document.getCurrentAccessPermission().canExtractContent() before extracting. If this returns false, the example throws an exception instead of silently writing text. PDFBox also documents that getText cannot process an encrypted document unless it has been opened appropriately.
For a password-protected PDF, load it using the password-aware method supported by your PDFBox version. The command-line tool also provides a password option, documented in the PDFBox command-line documentation. Do not assume that being able to open a file means its permissions allow text extraction.
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Why the TXT output may be empty or garbled
- The PDF may contain only page images.
PDFTextStripperextracts an existing text layer; it does not document an OCR step. If the pages are scans with no extractable text, use an OCR process separately. - The document may be encrypted. Open it appropriately with its password before calling
getText. - Extraction may be disallowed. Check
canExtractContent()and handle a denied permission explicitly. - Reading order may not match the visual page. Compare the default order with
setSortByPosition(true), especially for columns.
Extract text from the command line
For a quick check or a batch workflow, PDFBox provides an ExtractText command-line tool. Its documented form is:
java -jar pdfbox-app-2.y.z.jar ExtractText [OPTIONS] <inputfile> [Text file]The tool can write to a text file or the console, set an encoding such as UTF-8, accept a password, and select page-related options. See the PDFBox command-line documentation for the available options for your version.
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