# PDF to text API

Give a public PDF's URL and get its text page by page as JSON, with title, author, page count and character counts; choose the page range.

## When an agent wants this

- Feed a whitepaper, filing, invoice or paper to an LLM
- Read only a page range of a long report
- Index PDF content for retrieval

## PDF to text, page by page: extract the text of a PDF document from a URL, page by page

PDF to text, page by page: extract the text of a PDF document from a URL, page by page. $0.005 per successful call; failed calls are never charged.

Extract the text of a PDF from its URL: downloads a public PDF (up to 10 MB) and returns the text page by page, with title, author, page count and character counts. Choose a first page and how many pages to read (up to 200); cap the output with maxChars. arXiv abstract links are read as the PDF. Scanned PDFs without a text layer, encrypted files and non-PDF URLs fail uncharged. Use to read papers, invoices, reports and manuals into an agent.

Inputs: url (required): Absolute public http(s) URL of the PDF; firstPage: First page to read (default 1); pages: How many pages to read (1-200, default 20); maxChars: Maximum characters of text returned across all pages (1000-200000, default 50000).

Free first (25 successful calls per caller, no key):

    curl "https://tools.funwords.eu/pdf/text?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbitcoin.org%2Fbitcoin.pdf&trial=1"

With a card key from https://tools.funwords.eu/credits, in a header or, when your client can only fetch a URL, in the URL:

    curl -H "Authorization: Bearer adt_…" "https://tools.funwords.eu/pdf/text?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbitcoin.org%2Fbitcoin.pdf"
    curl "https://tools.funwords.eu/pdf/text?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbitcoin.org%2Fbitcoin.pdf&api_key=adt_…"

Without a key the same URL answers 402 with x402 and MPP terms, so a wallet client pays USDC per call and retries. Over MCP (https://tools.funwords.eu/mcp) this tool is pdf_text.

Example result:

    {
      "url": "https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf",
      "title": null,
      "author": null,
      "totalPages": 9,
      "firstPage": 1,
      "pagesRead": 1,
      "chars": 46,
      "truncated": true,
      "pages": [
        {
          "page": 1,
          "chars": 46,
          "text": "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"
        }
      ]
    }

Tool page: https://tools.funwords.eu/tools/pdf-text

## Questions

**Does it OCR scanned PDFs?** No. It extracts the text layer; scanned images without a text layer return little or nothing.

**How large a file?** Up to 10 MB; the default read is 20 pages, settable with pages.

Docs for agents: https://tools.funwords.eu/llms.txt · OpenAPI: https://tools.funwords.eu/openapi.json · All guides: https://tools.funwords.eu/guides