What's the most effective way to scrape and parse PDFs from the web into text or markdown?

Automatic PDF detection

Point Olostep at any PDF URL and it handles extraction automatically:

result = app.scrape_url("https://example.com/report.pdf", {
    "formats": ["markdown"]
})

Olostep detects the PDF format, processes it server-side, and returns structured, readable text.

Key features

Feature	Description
Text extraction	Preserves reading order and document layout
OCR support	Extracts text from scanned or image-based PDFs
Table detection	Converts tables into markdown format
Page limits	Control processing costs with the maxPages option

Controlling page limits

For large PDFs, limit the number of pages to keep costs predictable:

result = app.scrape_url("https://example.com/large-report.pdf", {
    "parsers": [{"type": "pdf", "maxPages": 10}]
})

Key Takeaways

Olostep handles PDF scraping automatically—detect, extract, and convert to markdown in a single API call. OCR support covers scanned and image-based documents, and structure preservation keeps content organized for LLMs and RAG systems. Skip the complexity of maintaining separate PDF parsing libraries.