Search Inside Your PDFs Without Opening Them
Applicant uploads a resume. The text lands in a long text field on their record. Now you can search, filter, and trigger automations based on what's inside the PDF.
Set Up PDF ExtractionSound familiar?
HR Coordinator
You have 200 resumes as PDF attachments. To find candidates with Python experience, you open each one manually.
Compliance Officer
Signed contracts live as attachments. When legal needs to search for a specific clause, someone spends hours opening files.
Grant Manager
Grant proposals arrive as PDFs. Comparing them means opening 30 documents side by side instead of filtering a table.
What it does
Full text extraction
Pull all readable text from PDF files. Handles multi-page documents, tables, and formatted text.
Field mapping
Extracted text goes into any long text field. Use it for search, automations, or display in interfaces.
Multi-page support
Works with PDFs of any length. Extract from all pages or specify a page range.
Automatic processing
Runs every time a form submission includes a PDF attachment. No manual trigger needed.
How to set it up
Select the attachment field
Choose which field contains the PDF uploads you want to extract text from.
Choose the destination field
Pick a long text field where extracted text will be saved. Create a new one if needed.
Configure extraction settings
Set page range (all or specific pages), choose whether to preserve formatting, and set a character limit if needed.
Enable and test
Activate the extractor and submit a test form with a PDF. Check that the text appears in your destination field.
Going deeper
Extraction options
- Full document or specific page ranges
- Preserve paragraph structure
- Extract tables as tab-separated text
- Character limit with truncation
Use cases
- Make resume content searchable
- Index contract terms for filtering
- Extract invoice data for processing
- Pull metadata from uploaded reports
Works with
- Standard text PDFs
- Multi-column documents
- Documents with headers and footers
- Forms with fillable fields
Frequently asked questions
Does it work with scanned PDFs?
It extracts embedded text from standard PDFs. Scanned documents (image-only PDFs) need OCR, which is not currently supported.
Is there a file size limit?
Up to 25MB per PDF. Most form-uploaded documents are well under this limit.
Can I extract from multiple PDFs on one record?
Yes. If an attachment field has multiple PDFs, text from all of them is extracted and concatenated in the destination field.
Does it preserve formatting like bold and headings?
Plain text only. Formatting markers are stripped, but paragraph breaks and basic structure are maintained.
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