PDF to text

The words, without the PDF around them

Copying text out of a PDF by hand, selecting and pasting page after page, is slow and often brings along stray line breaks and spacing from the original layout. This tool reads every page and gives you the text as one plain block, ready to search, paste into another document, or feed into another tool that needs plain text rather than a PDF.

How it works

Each page of the PDF is read directly by your browser using the same technology that lets you select text in a PDF viewer. The text from every page is combined into a single block, with a clear marker between pages, and shown in a box you can copy from or download as a .txt file.

What it needs to work

This reads existing, selectable text; it does not recognize text from an image. If a PDF is a scan, a photo of a document saved as a PDF, or was exported with the text flattened into pictures, there is no text layer to extract, and this tool will say so. Use PDF OCR instead for those documents, which reads the text visually rather than relying on a text layer.

What the output looks like

Text is extracted in the reading order the PDF provides, which is usually left to right and top to bottom, but can occasionally differ for documents with columns or complex layouts. Formatting such as bold, italics, font size and images is not preserved, since the output is plain text.

Privacy

Your PDF is read entirely in your browser; nothing is uploaded to extract its text.