Extract Text from PDF
Pull the text out of a PDF so you can edit, search or reuse it.
Drop your PDF here
or choose a file from your device.
PDF up to 200 MB · processed on your device, never uploadedHow it works
- Drop a PDF onto the page.
- Wait a moment while the text is read from each page.
- Copy the text or download it as a .txt file, with or without page markers.
Frequently asked questions
Why is no text found in my PDF?
Scanned PDFs and photos of documents contain pictures of text, not real characters. Extracting text from them needs OCR (optical character recognition), which this tool does not perform.
Why is the text order or spacing slightly off?
PDFs store text as positioned fragments rather than paragraphs. Multi-column layouts, tables and footnotes can come out in a different order than they appear, so review the result for complex layouts.
Does it keep formatting like bold and headings?
No. The output is plain text, which is ideal for editing, searching or pasting elsewhere. Line breaks are kept where the PDF has them.
Is my document uploaded?
No. Text is extracted by pdf.js running in your browser, so private documents stay on your device.
Get the text out of a PDF
Copying text from a PDF viewer often breaks lines awkwardly or misses pages. This tool reads the text layer of every page and gives you clean, editable plain text in one place — ready to paste into a document, email or translation tool.
Page markers
With page markers switched on, each page starts with a line like --- Page 3 ---, which makes it easy to cite or find passages later. Turn them off for continuous text.
Text-based vs scanned PDFs
PDFs created from word processors, browsers and design apps contain real text and extract perfectly. Scanned documents contain images of pages instead; to get text from those you need OCR software. The tool tells you when a PDF has no text layer.