title: Using Extracttext from cfpdf to get text of a pdf in coldfusion
body: <p>Currently, I have a pdf that is not searchable and I am wondering what the best process is for preparing the file for coldfusion so I can index the file.</p>
  
  <p>In particular, I am wondering whether a pdf file needs to be readable before using extracttext in cfpdf to pull the text from it.</p>
  
  <p>I really appreciate the advice and I hope it helps other people who are interested in indexing pdf files with coldfusion.</p>
  
  <p>I was considering extracting the text with Tesseract as suggested here</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/496875/performing-optical-character-recognition-on-pdfs-from-coldfusion-using-a-java-o">Performing Optical Character Recognition on PDF&#39;s from ColdFusion using a Java or .NET Library?</a></p>
  
  <p>but if there is a built in feature in coldfusion, I would much rather use that and I think it would be more helpful to other people to know whether coldfusion can natively handle this task.</p>