PDF to Text — Extract Text From a PDF
Get the words out of a PDF — to paste somewhere, to search, or to feed into something else. Line breaks are preserved, and each page is marked.
How to use PDF to Text
- Upload the PDFDrop the file in. Extraction starts immediately, page by page.
- Read the resultThe text appears in a box you can scroll through and check before you save anything.
- Download or copySave it as a .txt file, or copy the whole thing to the clipboard in one click.
Text PDFs versus scans — the difference that decides everything
Two files can look identical on screen and be completely different inside. A text PDF stores actual characters, so the words can be selected, searched and extracted. A scanned PDF is a photograph of a page: to your eye it is text, to software it is a picture with no words in it at all.
This tool reads the first kind. If you feed it the second, it will tell you plainly that no text was found rather than handing back an empty file with no explanation. Getting text out of a scan needs OCR — optical character recognition — which this site does not currently offer.
A quick way to tell before you start: open the PDF and try to select a line of text with your mouse. If a selection highlight appears, extraction will work.
How the layout is handled
A PDF does not store paragraphs — it stores runs of characters at coordinates. Text is grouped back into lines by vertical position, so the output keeps the document's line breaks instead of collapsing each page into one long paragraph. Each page is marked with a --- Page n --- header so you can find your place in a long document.
Multi-column layouts are the honest weak spot. Because reconstruction works down the page, two columns can interleave. For ordinary single-column documents the output is clean.
Questions people ask
Why did I get no text?
Because the PDF is a scan — an image of a page with no character data in it. The tool says so explicitly when this happens. Extracting text from a scan requires OCR.
Does it keep the formatting?
It keeps line breaks and page boundaries. Bold, italics, fonts and colours are not part of plain text and are not preserved.
Is the file uploaded?
No. Extraction runs entirely in your browser.