As sigmaml said, Tika uses PDFBox. I would still recommend using PDFBox for text extraction until Tika updates to PDFBox 2.0. The biggest difference I have foun

As sigmaml said, Tika uses PDFBox. I would still recommend using PDFBox for text extraction until Tika updates to PDFBox 2.0. The biggest difference I have found with PDFBox 2.0 versus 1.x is that there are significantly fewer blank lines in the 2.0 output. This helps with readability and further processing on the output such as detecting headings, paragraphs, etc.