PDF to Text
Get the words out of a PDF and into something you can actually edit.
Click to choose a PDF, or drag & drop it
PDF only · read in your browser, never uploaded
Leave blank to read the whole document.
Done
What this tool does
This tool reads the text layer a PDF already contains and gives it back as plain text you can copy, edit or save as a .txt file.
The limitation is the important part, and the tool states it rather than leaving you to work it out: this is not OCR. A PDF produced from a word processor carries the actual characters, and those come out cleanly. A scanned document is a photograph of paper with no text in it at all, and this tool will correctly find nothing. When that happens the page says so explicitly — "no text found, this is probably a scan" — because an empty box with no explanation looks exactly like a broken tool.
Line breaks are reconstructed by grouping text runs that share a baseline position, which is what recovers readable paragraphs from the many PDFs that store each word as a separate run with no line information at all.
How to use it
- Drop in your PDF.
- Optionally narrow the pages field to the part of the document you need.
- Press Extract text. Progress is reported page by page on a long document.
- Use Copy all to put the text on your clipboard, or Download .txt to save it. The line underneath the box reports the word and character counts.
Common use cases
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Reusing content
Pull a paragraph or a table out of a report to quote it, rather than retyping it.
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Searching a document
Turn a PDF into text so you can search it properly or feed it to another tool.
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Translation
Extract the text, then run it through a translator that will not accept a PDF.
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Data and analysis
Get statement or report text into a form you can paste into a spreadsheet or a script.
Frequently asked questions
It found no text. Is the tool broken?
Almost certainly not — the file is a scan. A scanned PDF is a photograph of each page with no text layer, so there are no characters to extract, only pixels. Getting text out of those needs OCR, which is a different job from this one. You would recognise the same result in any PDF reader: try selecting the text in Acrobat or Preview and you will find there is nothing to select.
Does the formatting survive?
Paragraphs and line breaks do; columns, tables and precise spacing do not. Plain text has no way to represent a two-column layout, so the columns are read in the order they appear on the page. For anything where layout matters, you want the page as an image rather than as text.
Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
Not directly. Unlock it first with the PDF Unlocker if you know the password, then extract the text from the unlocked copy.