PDF to Text
Pull the real text out of a PDF instead of fighting a mouse selection. Read it page by page, copy it, or download a .txt file — everything runs locally with PDF.js.
How to use PDF to Text
- Upload a text-based PDF.
- Click “Extract text” to read the content.
- Review the extracted text per page.
- Copy it or download it as a .txt file.
About PDF to Text
A PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores glyphs with coordinates — put this character at x=72, y=634, in this font at this size — and any sense of lines, words and reading order has to be inferred afterwards. That is why dragging a selection across a reader so often produces dropped spaces, broken line endings or two columns interleaved with each other. Reading the text layer directly through PDF.js is more dependable: items come back with their transforms attached, and a new line is begun whenever the vertical position shifts by more than a couple of points.
The important limit is that this reads text which genuinely exists in the file. A scan is a photograph of words, not words. It has no text layer at all, so there is nothing to extract, and the tool says so plainly instead of handing back an empty file without explanation. The quick check is available in any reader: if you cannot select a sentence with the cursor there, no extractor will pull it out here. Turning a scan into text requires optical character recognition, a fundamentally different and much less certain process that this tool deliberately does not pretend to offer.
Even with a proper text layer, some things do not survive the trip. Multi-column layouts come out in the order the glyphs were written, which is usually but not always column by column. Table structure is lost, because a table in a PDF is text positioned inside drawn rules rather than rows and cells. Words split across a line ending keep their hyphen. Ligatures and unusual font encodings can produce odd characters, and a document whose fonts were embedded without a usable character map may return gibberish even though it looks perfect on screen.
What you get is plain text with a marker before each page, which makes it easy to paste into a document, feed to a script, search across, or run a word count on. The whole extraction happens in the tab, and that matters because the documents people most want to strip text out of — contracts to quote from, statements to reconcile, papers to summarise — are the ones they would least like to hand to somebody else’s server. The .txt download is written locally from exactly the result shown on screen.
Frequently asked questions
Does this work on scanned PDFs?
No, and no extractor can. A scan holds an image of a page, with no characters recorded anywhere in the file, so there is nothing to read out. Making one searchable needs optical character recognition, which guesses at letters from pixels and is not part of this tool.
How can I tell whether my PDF has a text layer?
Open it in any reader and try to select a sentence with the cursor. If the text highlights word by word, a text layer exists and extraction will work. If the whole page highlights as one block, or nothing highlights at all, it is an image.
Is the extraction private?
Yes. The document is parsed by PDF.js inside this page and the result never leaves your machine — no upload, no server-side parsing, no copy retained anywhere. Even the .txt download is assembled in browser memory.
Why does the text come out in a different order from the page?
Because reading order is inferred from coordinates. Newspaper-style columns, sidebars, pull quotes and footnotes are all just glyphs at positions, so a two-column paper can interleave if the columns were written line by line rather than block by block.
Why do some characters come out wrong?
Usually a font encoding problem. Ligatures such as fi and fl are single glyphs that may map back oddly, and a font embedded without a proper character map gives the extractor no way to know which letters its glyphs represent — the page looks right, but the underlying codes are meaningless.
Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
Not while it is encrypted; the content streams cannot be read and the file is reported as protected. Open it with the password in a reader, save an unprotected copy, and extract from that.
Related tools
- Split PDF — Pull out pages or split into files
- Merge PDF — Combine multiple PDFs into one
- JPG to PDF — Turn images into a PDF
- PDF to JPG — Export pages as images
- Compress PDF — Shrink image-heavy PDFs
- Organize PDF Pages — Reorder & delete pages visually