MacOS – How to extract the text of a PDF document with Automator, and save it in a directory

There might be nothing wrong with the script, but rather with the way the PDF is constructed. Text extraction from PDF is much trickier than simply reading in an RTF file. How has the PDF been created?

Due to lack of a better solution, I’d simply open the PDF in Preview.app, ⌘+A, open a new text document in your text editor of choice, ⌘+V, save the file, then use that as the text source instead of the PDF file.

While Automator is pretty useful, I personally find the Terminal / command line a nice place to solve problems like this.

The basic idea is still using the steps you describe, but doing all the work from the command line. I researched a useful PDF-to-Text converter, and I found PDFminer quite useful. If you can get it to run, half of your work is done!

pip install pdfminer

Step one and two, then can be solved with this one-liner in Terminal:

pdf2txt.py example.pdf | say -v Daniel -o example.aiff

Still missing is the addition of metadata — what do you need here: Title / Album / "Artist"?

In a final step, you would add the file to a certain iTunes playlist. Depending on your ideal workflow, one then could build a little LaunchAgent that monitors a folder for new files...