PDF to Text

Extracting text instead of retyping

Copying content out of a PDF by hand is slow and introduces mistakes, especially with long documents, numbers or names. Extracting the text directly gives you the exact words the document contains, ready to paste into an editor, a spreadsheet, an email or a translation tool. It is the fastest way to reuse the content of a report, quote a passage accurately or feed a document into another program.

Digital PDFs versus scans

There is an important difference between the two. A PDF created from a computer, such as an exported invoice or report, contains real text that can be pulled out perfectly. A scanned PDF is really a series of photographs of paper, so there is no text inside it to extract; you need optical character recognition instead. If this tool returns nothing, your document is almost certainly a scan, and the Image to Text (OCR) tool is what you want.

What to expect from the output

• All readable text from every page, in reading order.
• Formatting such as columns, tables and styling is flattened into plain text.
• You can edit the result directly before copying it.
• Long documents are handled page by page, with progress shown as it works.

Free and completely private

Extraction runs in your browser with pdfjs, so even a confidential contract or medical report never leaves your device. There is no signup, no page limit and no cost.