Extract text from PDF documents for LLM analysis

Use This When

• Building document Q&A systems that need full PDF text content for LLM context
• Creating document processing pipelines that extract information from PDF reports
• Implementing automated document analysis for compliance or content review
• Preparing PDF text for RAG systems or knowledge base construction

What It Does

• Extracts plain text from PDF files using pypdf library (or converts to Markdown when enabled)
• Optionally prepends document filename as context for multi-document processing (plain text or Markdown)
• Streams documents sequentially from configured directory with optional looping
• Returns concatenated text from all pages as single String message

Works Best With

• This component → query-llm or llm-analyze-document for document Q&A
• PDF collections → this component → text analysis or information extraction
• Integration with chatbot-analyze-document for conversational document exploration
• Feeding downstream text processing for summarization or classification

Caveats

• Text extraction quality depends on PDF structure; scanned PDFs without OCR yield empty text
• Markdown conversion quality depends on PDF layout; complex layouts (tables/multi-column) may be imperfect or out of order
• Document context flag adds filename header; disable for clean text extraction
• Repeat mode loops indefinitely; disable for one-pass batch document processing