Summarize PDF Guide

Learn to develop your own PDF summarization software to automatically generate summaries from PDF files.

Remember that in order to use our Tool Guides, you need to have previous knowledge about the basics to processing a PDF with our REST API. We strongly recommend that you read the Processing a PDF guide before starting this one.

Basic summarize

You can summarize PDF files very easily using the Summarize PDF tool, as shown in this code:

Basic summarize

// Create a new task
$myTaskSummarize = $ilovepdf->newTask('summarize');
// Add files to task for upload
$file1 = $myTaskSummarize->addFile('path/to/file1_name.pdf');
// Execute the task
$myTaskSummarize->execute();
// Download the summarized file
$myTaskSummarize->download();

You can add as many files as you want to summarize. To process your files, simply choose the Summarize PDF tool.

Advanced summarize

You can configure the language used to generate the summary.

Simply set the property language with your desired language like this:

Advanced summarize

// Create a new task
$myTaskSummarize = $ilovepdf->newTask('summarize');

// Set summarize options
$myTaskSummarize->setLanguage('en');

// Set output format
$myTaskSummarize->setOutputFormat('md');

// Add files to task for upload
$file1 = $myTaskSummarize->addFile('path/to/file1_name.pdf');

// Execute the task
$myTaskSummarize->execute();

// Download the summarized file
$myTaskSummarize->download();

Use setOutputFormat() to define the output type for the summarized document.

Supported output formats:

'pdf' → Generates a summarized PDF document
'md' → Generates a Markdown file (.md)

These are some of the supported language codes:

en for English.
es for Spanish.
fr for French.
de for German.
it for Italian.
pt for Portuguese.
ja for Japanese.

The REST API analyzes the content of your PDF files and generates concise summaries in the selected language.