Skip to main content
manjit.1486
June 17, 2022
Question

Convert PDF To CSV

  • June 17, 2022
  • 4 replies
  • 0 views

Hey Folks,

I am using an excel tools plugin for converting HTML to CSV. Now, there is a new requirement for converting PDF to CSV, and walking through the discussions and searches I haven't found any good match or solution. Can anyone help me with this? It would be highly appreciated.

4 replies

July 4, 2022

Hello, does the PDF file have a specific format? like tables or plain text? could you share an example?

July 4, 2022

you could use the following plugin to extract the text from the PDF (getpdftext function)

https://community.appian.com/b/appmarket/posts/pdf-tools

afther that you can use the extracted text to create a CSV file manually using the Text Doc from Template smartserivce

there is a youtube channel where they explain the creating a csv process: "Native Bean Turorials" the video is "Appain: CDT to CSV | English | NBT"

manjit.1486
July 4, 2022

Thanks, Martin for the information. I already used getpdftext function to extract data from the pdf file. Then, I break the data according to requirements and parsed it to CDT. However, I managed to accomplish the goal and it's working right. 

I will definitely check the youtube link for additional information. Thanks

March 30, 2026

That is a  real scenario lots of folks start with HTML to CSV and then bump into PDF to CSV which is a bit trickier because PDFs are not structured like HTML tables

what you can do depends on the kind of PDFs you have if they are mostly table‑based then using a tool that can extract tables first makes your life much easier

one simple approach outside your plugin environment is to use a PDF to CSV converter first and then save that Excel as CSV once it looks right inside Excel or Sheets
this gives you a structured intermediate format to work with