PDF to Text
Pull the text out of a PDF so you can copy it, search it or paste it into another document — page by page, with optional page markers.
Drag and drop a PDF here
or click to browse
Your files are processed locally in your browser and are not uploaded to our servers.
How to use pdf to text
- 1Choose a PDF.
- 2Wait a moment while the text is read from each page.
- 3Turn page markers on or off.
- 4Copy the text or download it as a .txt file.
About this tool
Most PDFs created from Word, Google Docs, web pages or accounting software store their text as real characters. This tool reads that text with pdf.js and rebuilds the lines and paragraphs, ready to paste into an email, a spreadsheet or another document.
Scanned PDFs are different: each page is a photo of paper, with no text inside it. Getting text from those needs OCR (optical character recognition), which this tool doesn't do — instead of returning an empty result, it tells you when pages have no extractable text.
Plain text doesn't keep formatting: tables become lines of text, columns may be read across rather than down, and headers and footers appear where they sit on the page. Everything happens in your browser; the PDF isn't uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
The PDF is almost certainly scanned or made from images, so its pages are pictures rather than text. Those need OCR software. A quick check: if you can't select words in your PDF viewer, there's no text to extract.
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