PDF to Text
Pull the words out of a PDF as plain text — copy them straight to your clipboard or save them as a .txt file.
Drop a file here, or click to browse
A single PDF
How to extract text from a PDF
Drop a PDF above and press Extract text. Every page is read in order and the result appears in the box below, where you can read through it before doing anything with it. From there, Copy puts the whole thing on your clipboard, and .txt saves it as a plain text file named after the original PDF.
Text-based PDFs versus scans
This matters more than anything else about the tool. A PDF made by exporting from Word, a browser or a typesetting system carries a real text layer — the characters are stored as characters, which is why you can select them in a PDF reader. Those extract cleanly and completely. A PDF made by scanning or photographing paper is just pictures of words; there are no characters in the file at all, only pixels. Nothing can be extracted from it without optical character recognition, so the tool will tell you plainly that no selectable text was found rather than returning an empty box. A quick way to check in advance: open the PDF in any reader and try to select a sentence with your cursor. If you cannot, this tool cannot either.
What to expect from the output
You get the words, not the design. Plain text has no concept of bold, columns, tables, headers or images, so a two-column academic paper may interleave oddly and a table will arrive as a run of values. That is the normal trade-off for a format that pastes anywhere and is searchable everywhere. It is exactly what you want for quoting a passage, feeding a document into a search index or a language model, counting words, or rescuing the contents of a PDF you can no longer edit. Extraction runs in your browser, so contracts, statements and reports are never uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
Why does it say no selectable text was found?+
Your PDF is a scan or a photograph — the pages are images of words, not actual text, so there is nothing to extract. You would need OCR software to convert those pictures into characters. Test it by trying to select a sentence in any PDF reader: if you cannot, this tool cannot either.
Does this tool do OCR on scanned documents?+
No. It reads the text layer that is already inside the PDF. It does not perform optical character recognition on scanned pages.
Will the formatting be preserved?+
No — the output is plain text. Fonts, bold, colours, tables and images are dropped, and multi-column layouts may read out of order. You get the words, which is what makes the result easy to paste and search.
Can I copy the text instead of downloading it?+
Yes. Press Copy to put the full extracted text on your clipboard, ready to paste anywhere. Use the .txt button instead if you want it saved as a file.
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?+
No. Extraction happens entirely in your browser, so the document never leaves your device and we never see its contents. Free, with no account needed.