Extract text from a PDF
Pull the words out of a PDF as plain text, without sending the document anywhere.
- Runs on your device — the file is never sent anywhere
- No sign-up, no watermarks, no daily quotas
- Free, with no limit on how often you use it
How it works
A PDF containing real text carries the characters themselves, positioned on the page. This tool reads them out in page order and writes them to a plain text file — useful for quoting, searching, word counts, or feeding a document into something that cannot read PDF.
Text PDFs and scanned PDFs are different things
If a PDF was produced by a word processor or export, its text is stored as text and extraction works. If it was produced by a scanner or a phone camera, each page is a photograph of a document — there are no characters to extract, only pixels. Reading those needs OCR, which this tool deliberately does not attempt. It tells you when it finds nothing rather than handing back an empty file with no explanation.
Layout does not survive
PDF stores text as fragments placed at coordinates, not as paragraphs. Extraction reconstructs lines by grouping fragments at the same height, which works well for ordinary prose and poorly for multi-column layouts, tables and sidebars, where reading order can come out jumbled.
Page markers
Each page is preceded by a marker so you can tell where one ends and the next begins. Strip them with find-and-replace if you want continuous prose.
Extract text from a PDF — questions
Why is my extracted file empty?
The PDF is almost certainly a scan. Its pages are images rather than text, so there are no characters to extract. Reading those requires OCR, which this tool does not do.
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. Extraction runs in your browser using Mozilla's PDF.js. The document never leaves your device.
Does it keep the formatting?
No. You get plain text. PDF stores text as positioned fragments rather than paragraphs, so columns and tables in particular may come out in an unexpected order.