PDF to Text

About getting text out of a PDF

A PDF made from a document already contains its text. The letters are in the file; the reader just draws them in the right places on the page.

Getting them out should be easy, and usually is not. Select-all in a reader gives you the headers, the footers and the page numbers mixed into the middle of sentences. Copy a table and it arrives as one long line. Copy two columns and they interleave. And on a phone you often cannot select at all.

This tool asks the PDF for its text directly and hands you the result in a box you can edit, copy or download as a .txt file.

It reads, it does not guess

This is not OCR. OCR looks at a picture of a page and tries to recognise the shapes as letters — useful, but it makes mistakes, and 1, l and I are a lifetime of them.

Here there is nothing to recognise. The characters are already stored in the PDF, and they come out exactly as they went in. No misread letters, no confidence score, and no waiting: a 200-page report is done in a couple of seconds.

The one thing it cannot do is read a scan. A scanned page is a photograph, with no text inside it at all. When that happens the tool says so plainly instead of handing you an empty box — and points you at the OCR route.

Choose the pages

Leave the Pages box empty to take the whole document, or name what you want:

• 5 — just page 5
• 1-3 — the first three pages
• 1-3, 5, 8-10 — mix ranges and single pages

Useful when the thing you need is one chapter of a long report, or when the first two pages are a cover and a contents list you do not want.

Line breaks: keep or join

A PDF stores where every line was drawn, not where a sentence ends. So a paragraph arrives as five separate lines that were only broken because the page ran out of width.

• Keep the lines as they are — exactly as the page was laid out. Right for tables, addresses, poetry, code, lists, and anything where the line *is* the meaning.
• Join lines into paragraphs — puts a broken sentence back together into one line. Right for prose you are going to paste into a document, an email or a translator.

The joining is careful: a line that ends a sentence, a heading, a bullet and a numbered item all keep their break. Only a line that clearly stops mid-sentence is joined to the next.

Page markers

Mark where each page starts puts a --- Page 7 --- line between pages. Leave it on when you need to find your way back to the original — quoting a report, checking a contract, citing a source. Turn it off when you want clean running text to paste somewhere else.

Nothing leaves your device

The PDF is opened and read inside your browser. It is not uploaded, not queued, and not stored. That matters for the documents people actually need this for: contracts, statements, medical letters, legal papers, anything under an NDA.

It also means there is no file size limit from an upload, and it works offline once the page has loaded.

What people use it for

• Getting a quote out of a report without retyping it
• Feeding a document into a translator, a summariser or a search
• Turning a manual or a policy into plain text to search with Ctrl+F
• Pulling prose out of a book or a paper to edit or study
• Getting text into a word processor when copy-paste from the reader arrives mangled
• Extracting content for a website from a PDF brochure
• Making a document readable by a screen reader that struggles with the PDF

Good to know

• A password-protected PDF must be unlocked first — use Unlock PDF
• A PDF that is a scan has no text; use PDF to JPG then Image to Text
• Columns, tables and footnotes come out in the order the PDF stores them, which is usually but not always the order you read them — check the result
• The text box is editable, so you can tidy the result before downloading it
• The download is a plain .txt file in UTF-8, so accented and non-Latin characters survive
• Formatting — bold, size, colour, images — is not kept. Plain text is the point. For a formatted document use PDF to Word

How to use it

• Click Click to upload, or drag your PDF onto the box
• Leave Pages empty for the whole document, or type the pages you want
• Choose Keep the lines as they are for tables and lists, or Join lines into paragraphs for prose
• Tick or untick Mark where each page starts
• Press Extract text, read the result, then Copy it or Download .txt

Related tools

• PDF to Word — when you need the formatting, not just the words
• Image to Text — OCR, for scans and screenshots
• PDF to JPG — turn scanned pages into images to run through OCR
• Unlock PDF — remove a password first
• Find Text in Files — search a whole folder at once
• Word Counter — count what you extracted
• Split PDF — pull out a page range as its own PDF