PDF to Text
Pull the text out of a PDF so you can copy, edit or search it.
Drop a PDF here
or click to browse
Files are processed on your device and never uploaded.
How it works
- Drop your PDF onto the tool — extraction starts immediately.
- Review the text, and untick Mark page breaks if you want it as one continuous block.
- Copy it to the clipboard or download it as a .txt file.
Frequently asked questions
- Nothing was extracted — why?
- Your PDF is almost certainly scanned. A scanned document is a series of photographs of paper, so there is no text inside it to extract, only pixels that look like text to a human eye. Recovering words from that needs OCR, which recognises characters in an image. This tool reads the text layer only, and tells you plainly when there is not one rather than handing back an empty box.
- Why is the formatting lost?
- Because a PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores fragments of text with coordinates — this word at this position in this font. Columns, tables and headers are visual arrangements, not structure. Line breaks are reconstructed here from vertical position and the end-of-line hints pdf.js provides, which works well for ordinary prose and imperfectly for multi-column layouts and complex tables.
- Will a table come out usable?
- Partly. You will get all the cell contents, but the row and column relationships are largely lost because they were never encoded — the cells are simply text at particular coordinates. Simple tables often come out readable; dense financial tables usually need rearranging by hand afterwards.
- Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
- Only if it opens without a password. Files restricted against copying can generally still be read, but a document that needs a password to open is encrypted and cannot be decrypted without it — you will get an error rather than text.
- Is my document uploaded?
- No. Extraction happens inside your browser and the .txt file is generated on your device. Nothing is transmitted, and the PDF engine itself is served from this site rather than a third-party CDN. That matters here more than usual, since the documents people want as plain text are often contracts, statements and reports.
About this tool
Getting text out of a PDF is one of those tasks that should be trivial and often is not — the reader will not let you select cleanly across pages, copying loses half the content, or the file simply refuses. This tool reads the document’s text layer directly and gives you the whole thing at once, with a word count, optional page markers, a copy button and a .txt download.
It helps to know what a PDF actually contains, because it explains the results. A PDF does not store paragraphs, columns or tables; it stores positioned fragments of text — this string, in this font, at these coordinates. Everything you perceive as layout is a visual arrangement of those fragments. Line breaks here are reconstructed from vertical positions and the end-of-line hints the parser supplies, which handles ordinary prose well and multi-column pages or dense tables less well. Cell contents survive; the grid that related them usually does not.
The one case this tool cannot handle is a scanned document, and it says so instead of returning an empty box. A scan is a photograph of paper: there is no text inside it, only pixels arranged to look like text. Extracting words from that requires OCR — optical character recognition — which is a fundamentally different operation. If you see the no-text warning, that is what your file is.
Everything runs locally in your browser, including the PDF engine, which is served from this site rather than a third-party CDN so your document is never transmitted and no outside service learns you opened it. That is worth caring about for the files people usually want as plain text: contracts they need to quote, statements they need to total, reports they need to search, and academic papers they need to work with.