Manipulate PDF with Adobe developer API

Adobe developer API

Did you know that Adobe provides an API to perform all sort of manipulation on PDF files :

• Split PDF, Combine PDF
• OCR
• Insert page, delete page, replace page, reorder page
• Content extraction (text content, tables, pictures)
• ...

The free tier allows up to 500 PDF operation / month. As it comes directly from Adobe, it works often better than other alternatives.

Adobe documentation:

• https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/docs/overview/pdf-services-api/howtos/
• https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/docs/overview/pdf-extract-api/gettingstarted/

What does this workflow do

The API is a bit painful to use. To perform a transformation on a PDF it requires to

• Authenticate and get a temporal token
• Register a new asset (file)
• Upload you PDF to the registered asset
• Perform a query according to the transformation requested
• Wait for the query to be proccessed by Adobe backend
• Download the result

This workflow is a generic wrapper to perform all these steps for any transformation endpoint. I usually use it from other workflow with an Execute Workflow node.

Examples are given in the workflow.

Example use case

This service is useful for example to clean PDF data for an AI / RAG system.

My favorite use-case is to extract table as images and forward images to an AI for image recognition / description which is often more accuarate than feedind raw tabular data to a LLM.