PDF to Text

What this tool does

Pulls the text embedded in a PDF out as plain text you can copy or save. It reads the real text layer stored in the file; it does not try to recognise characters in images.

When to use it

• You want a document's contents in a text editor or an email without retyping them.
• You need to search a long document's text, or analyse it with another tool.
• You want to quote a passage from a report or paper exactly, with no transcription errors.

How to use it

1. 1Drag a PDF onto the drop area or choose it — one file at a time.
2. 2Wait for extraction to finish; the resulting text appears directly on the page.
3. 3Copy the text, or download it as a text file.

A practical example

A scanned document will come back empty or nearly empty, because its pages are images and contain no text layer at all.

Limitations

• It does not work on scanned documents or images converted to PDF — those need optical character recognition, so use the Scanned PDF OCR tool instead.
• Formatting is not preserved: fonts, colours, tables and columns are all lost, and the output is raw text.
• Multi-column documents can come out interleaved, because the order follows how the text is stored in the file rather than how it looks on the page.
• If no text can be extracted you get an explicit message, rather than a silently empty result.

Privacy and processing

Extraction happens inside your browser using a local PDF rendering engine. Neither the file nor the extracted text is sent to any server.

Technical notes

• Reading is done with pdf.js, which reads the text objects actually stored in the file rather than analysing a picture of the page.
• Text is extracted in logical character order, but how good the result is depends on how the original file embedded its fonts.