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PDF.co: App spotlight

How this app helps you customize and extract data from PDFs

By Elena Alston · February 23, 2022
PDF.co app logo on a bright red background

We all work with documents in some capacity. It's pretty much inevitable that at some point you'll be emailing a PDF to a client, signing an invoice, or even extracting key information from a report for your boss. 

But now imagine you deal with documents non-stop. Maybe you work in healthcare and have to process data by splitting, merging, or repairing PDF files (and accuracy is vital). Or, perhaps you're a paralegal and spend your afternoons extracting data to turn into legal contracts. That kind of manual processing gets old real fast. 

That's where PDF.co comes in. With it, you can automatically parse documents, split and merge PDFs, customize PDFs (with texts, images, and signatures), and extract any data. Think of it as a PDF toolkit that'll get more time back in your day to focus on your most important work. 

PDF.co origins: Creating a product based on user requests 

PDF.co is the product of ByteScout, which was founded in 2006. While most founders generally discover a gap in the market through trial and error, the PDF.co team took a different approach: listening to their users.  

They wanted a set of tools for PDF files and data extraction they'd be able to automate, so they could more easily read invoices, reports, and statements. 

Armed with that knowledge, a small team of experts who'd worked on data extraction solutions for enterprises joined forces to create an API platform that would extract all sorts of unstructured data from PDFs. 

The rest was PDF history.

Did you know? PDF.co was created based on real user requests—and the team still takes this approach today. They regularly add their users' most-wanted features. The result is a full toolkit of features for mastering PDFs.

PDF.co today: Leading the way with PDF file and data extraction

Today, thousands of customers (think NASA and BMW) use PDF.co's technology for PDF file and data extraction. Whatever your industry, from Fintech to education to healthcare—you can use the tool to easily extract data from documents and convert files into almost any format. 

The product comes packed with a ton of PDF tools. Whether you need to generate PDF from templates, convert your files into a different format, fill PDF forms, sign documents, split PDFs, translate your PDFs, or even add or read QR code barcodes, the world's pretty much your oyster when it comes to documents. 

Fave feature: The AI-powered Document Parser lets you read invoices, orders, statements, reports, and more with ready-to-use templates for reading fields and tables from PDFs.

Acceleration through automation: Popular PDF.co workflows

Unlock even more value out of your documents by connecting PDF.co with Zapier. That way, you'll be able to easily automate workflows with other apps you use. Here are a few popular workflows to get you started:

Convert new files in Dropbox to CSV using PDF.co and upload them back into Dropbox

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  • PDF.co logo
  • Dropbox logo
Dropbox + PDF.co
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    Convert new PDF from Dropbox folder into CSV format using PDF.co and upload generated CSV file back into a Dropbox folder. Customize the path of the CSV to upload. By default, it uses the same folder.

    Add barcodes to Google Sheets from new Dropbox folders using PDF.co

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    • PDF.co logo
    • Google Sheets logo
    Dropbox + PDF.co + Google Sheets
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      Read barcodes using PDF.co from new PDF or image files in Dropbox and save the results as a new rows in a Google Sheets spreadsheet. You can customize and change barcode types to read. PDF.co supports Code 39, Code 128, Datamatrix, PDF417 and dozens of other barcode types.

      Convert new emails to PDF using PDF.co

      • Email by Zapier logo
      • PDF.co logo
      Email by Zapier + PDF.co
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        Activate this Zap to automatically convert each new inbound email to a printable PDF files with PDF.co. Customize this HTML template to include other fields or change the layout and the design.

        Convert new emails from IMAP to PDF using PDF.co

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        IMAP by Zapier + PDF.co
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          Convert new emails from an IMAP mailbox into PDF using PDF.co. Modify the HTML template in PDF.co to add other fields or change the design of the output PDF.

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