Converting PDF Documents to Plain Text TXT in C#

The extraction of plain text from PDF documents for further processing, analysis or full text search is a common task. This article explains how to extract plain text from PDF documents programmatically with .NET C# and TX Text Control.

Extracting plain text from PDF documents for further processing, analyzing or searching is a common task. Typically, a PDF document contains a collection of characters at specific locations, and a filter is required to import the text to be extracted.

With TX Text Control, all typical word processing formats such as DOC, DOCX, RTF and PDF can be loaded for plain text extraction. The following code shows how to create a simple console application that loads a PDF document and then extracts the plain text from it.

Preparing the Application

A .NET 6 console application is created for the purposes of this demo.

Prerequisites

In Visual Studio, create a new Console App using .NET 6.
In the Solution Explorer, select your created project and choose Manage NuGet Packages. from the Project main menu. Select Text Control Offline Packages from the Package source drop-down. Install the latest versions of the following package:
- TXTextControl.TextControl.ASP.SDK

Create PDF

Adding a PDF

Create a folder named App_Data in the root of your project. Copy your PDF documents into this folder. In this example, the name of the PDF document that will be loaded is sample.pdf.

Adding the Code

Open the Program.cs file and add the following code:

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using ( TXTextControl . ServerTextControl tx = new TXTextControl . ServerTextControl ( ) )

tx . Create ( ) ;

TXTextControl . LoadSettings ls = new TXTextControl . LoadSettings ( )

PDFImportSettings = TXTextControl . PDFImportSettings . GenerateParagraphs

> ;

// load PDF document

tx . Load ( " App_Data/sample.pdf " , TXTextControl . StreamType . AdobePDF , ls ) ;

// retrieve plain text

var text = tx . Text ;

Console . WriteLine ( text ) ;

view raw test.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Alternatively, if the document is stored in a database or by some other method, you can load the document from a byte array.

byte [ ] document = File . ReadAllBytes ( " App_Data/sample.pdf " ) ;

tx . Load ( document , TXTextControl . BinaryStreamType . AdobePDF , ls ) ;

view raw test.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

TX Text Control recognizes matching words to create paragraphs and returns plain text written to the console.

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ASP.NET

Integrate document processing into your applications to create documents such as PDFs and MS Word documents, including client-side document editing, viewing, and electronic signatures.

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Summary
Preparing the Application
Prerequisites
Adding a PDF
Adding the Code

Technologies

Reporting
Document Editing
PDF Processing
Electronic Signatures
Document Viewing

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