Get Text from PDF

Get Text from PDF follows in the Extract Text from Image’s footsteps, albeit doing perhaps less-fancy work in the process as PDFs do provide the actual data in the document itself. That being said, in impact and expectation, it provides a similar benefit – letting users grab all the words from a format that’s not as accessible and utilize it in the course of their Shortcuts.
With Get Text From PDF, the data in the “portable document format” actually becomes a lot more portable – especially since the action has a “Rich Text” option that tries to preserve the integrity of the text so inline links and formatting still comes through.
Plus, users can specify the page Header and Footer text, allowing those to be ignored in the process of scraping the data. Finally, the pages can be combined (or not) as needed, either creating one large section of text at the end or a distinct list of each pages’ contents.
In practice, this action lets you copy-and-paste all the data out of a PDF, act on the data in all sorts of ways (like formatting that Rich Text as HTML or Markdown), and do things like create a new multi-page document out of it immediately or move to any other app that hooks into Shortcuts.