Batch PDF-to-Text Extraction for RAG Indexes, Flagging Scanned Files

Extracting text from PDFs is often the first obstacle in document-chat projects, and it becomes hard at scale with encrypted files, very long documents, and scans. A basic pypdf approach is simple to write, but it returns empty strings for scanned pages without warning. The author describes a hosted batch extractor that processes direct PDF links, outputs text and Markdown, and assigns a status to each file. Files with no extractable text are marked image_only and are not charged, so they can be routed to OCR or manual review. The guide also covers splitting the Markdown output into chunks for search or retrieval indexing.