PDF to text — extract the words from a document
Pull the text out of a PDF as plain, copyable text. It reads the text layer the document already contains, so what comes out is exactly what is in the file — no guessing, no recognition errors.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
All processing happens in your browser. Your file is never uploaded.
This reads the text layer the PDF already contains, so the result is exact rather than recognised. Reading order follows the order inside the file, which can come out unexpectedly for multi-column layouts, tables and sidebars.
How to use
- Drop in a PDF. Extraction starts immediately, page by page.
- Read the result. The character count tells you at a glance whether there was any text to find.
- Mark pages if you want. Optional page markers make it obvious where each page began.
- Copy or download. Take it to the clipboard, or save it as a .txt file.
Questions
Nothing came out. What went wrong?
Almost certainly nothing — your PDF is a scan. A scanned page is a photograph of text, not text, so there is nothing to extract. Getting words out of it needs OCR, which recognises shapes as letters. This tool does not do that, and it says so when it spots a document with no text layer.
How is this different from OCR?
OCR looks at pixels and guesses which letters they form, which is why it makes mistakes. This reads the characters the PDF already stores. When a text layer exists, extraction is exact — including accented characters, symbols and unusual scripts.
Why is the text in a strange order?
PDFs store text in drawing order, not reading order. For a single column that is the same thing. For newspapers, academic papers, tables and pages with sidebars it often is not, and fragments can arrive interleaved. Rearranging that reliably is a genuinely hard problem, and no extractor gets it right every time.
Are line breaks preserved?
Where the PDF marks them, yes. Paragraph breaks in the original often come through as line breaks here, because that is how the layout was stored. If you want flowing paragraphs, run the result through the remove line breaks tool.
Does it work on a password-protected PDF?
Yes, if you know the password — you will be asked for it before extraction begins.