Extract PDF text according to the page type

Try selecting a sentence in the PDF. If you can copy real text, PDF to text may extract it. If a page is an image scan, use PDF OCR instead; a document may mix both kinds of page.

Inspect the output page by page. Multi-column layouts, tables, footnotes, and ligatures can scramble reading order even when all words appear. OCR can confuse similar characters and numbers. Compare important passages with the source before publishing or using them in a calculation.

Keep the original PDF as the reference.