PDF text extractor
Copy the text inside a PDF
Choose a file
Extracted text
Text is extracted exactly as stored in the PDF. Lines are never merged or split; three or more blank lines in a row become two. Files are opened only in your browser and never sent to a server.
How to use
Pulls the text stored inside a PDF so you can copy it or save it as a TXT file. Each page is marked with a separator so you can tell where a passage came from. The words come out exactly as the PDF stores them — no lines are merged or split. The file is opened in your browser and never uploaded.
When to use it
- Copying a paragraph out of a contract, paper or report into another document.
- Pasting the contents of a PDF you received into an email or a chat.
- Collecting the text of several PDFs to search through it or run it through a translator.
How to use it
- Drop a PDF on the box or click to choose one. Up to 50MB and 200 pages.
- The pages are read one by one; when it finishes, the extracted text appears below.
- Copy the part you need, or press Save as TXT to download it.
Good to know
- Nothing is uploaded — opening the PDF and pulling out the text both finish inside this browser.
- A scanned PDF yields no text. It holds a photograph of paper, not letters. Reading words out of an image (OCR) is not part of this tool.
- Dense tables may come out in a different order than they look. A PDF records where each character sits, not that something is a table. When the table matters, use PDF to Excel.
- Runs of three or more blank lines are reduced to two. Nothing else about the original is changed.
- Password-protected PDFs cannot be opened.
Frequently asked questions
No text comes out at all.
The PDF is almost certainly a scan. It may look like text, but inside it is a picture, so there is nothing to extract — the tool says so on screen. For that you need OCR software, which this site does not provide.
Lines break in odd places.
A PDF stores text line by line, not as paragraphs, so the breaks of the original come along with it. Re-joining them automatically would change the original, so the text is left as it is. Tidy it up in your editor after pasting.
My table comes out scrambled.
There is no notion of a table in a PDF, only characters at positions. Dense tables may be read in an order that differs from what your eye follows. To keep the structure, use PDF to Excel instead.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. The PDF is opened inside your browser and the extracted text never leaves the page, so confidential documents are safe to use here.
Can I extract a single page?
Extract everything, then use the page markers (--- page 3 ---) to copy just the part you want. That is exactly what the markers are for.