PDF to Text : Batch Extract Text from PDF files 4+

Wow.. fast and accurate

I had a large number of pdf documents for conversion to text file format.
There were around 1000 ranging in length from article to book
and roughly split evenly along those lines, assuming a threshold of 40 000 words between article and book.

I had tried Acrobat Pro, first with a straight conversion, which failed in many cases.
Then I tried running full accessibility checks and fixes (including OCR).
Then I attempted the conversion again which also failed in many cases.

Acrobat - from Adobe, the creator of the pdf format - was the slowest.
On a single large document it could take up to an hour to process.
It was also the least accurate, and most prone to failure.
I did try tweaking various settings, but to no avail.

From there I tried Calibre, first on the unprocessed docs, then on the accessibility-processed ones.
I normally use the “Heuristic Processing” setting to clean up pdf conversions.
Calibre was a bit faster, a bit more accurate, and more successful.

Still, out of the original 1000 there were 70 documents that wouldn’t convert.
They were also a evenly splt between articles and books.
I don’t know how many were accessibility-processed by Acrobat, but I think most were un-processed.

So I dropped them into PDF to Text.app, and it did all of them in 10 minutes!
I haven’t gone over each one, but the 20 or so I looked at were more accurate and neater by far than either Acrobat or Calibre.