PDF to plain text

This workflow will extract the plain text content of PDF files supplied to the input port.  You can connect the Load PDF from directory workflow to this workflows input. We recommend you send the output from this workflow to the Clean plain text workflow, because the PDF to text process can add characters into the text that are XML-invalid and therefore can not be sent to most services as plain text.  Another way round this problem is to encode the text as Base64 using the handy local service ("Encode Byte Array to Base 64") included with Taverna, although this requires a service that knows to decode the Base 64 back to text, which is not common. The PDF to text service makes use of the "pdftotext" executable from Xpdf.

This is a workflow component, designed to be used as a nested workflow inside a larger text mining or text processing workflow.