 <p>If you want to extract pdf text into a astring, try to use <code>PdfTextExtractor.GetTextFromPage</code>, a sampe code:</p> <pre><code>public string ReadPdfFile(string fileName) { var text = new StringBuilder(); if (File.Exists(fileName)) { var pdfReader = new PdfReader(fileName); for (int page = 1; page &lt;= pdfReader.NumberOfPages; page++) { var strategy = new SimpleTextExtractionStrategy(); string currentText = PdfTextExtractor.GetTextFromPage(pdfReader, page, strategy); currentText = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ASCIIEncoding.Convert(Encoding.Default, Encoding.UTF8, Encoding.Default.GetBytes(currentText))); text.Append(currentText); } pdfReader.Close(); } return text.ToString(); } </code></pre>