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PDF Editor

Extract text from a PDF

Get every character of embedded text out of a PDF and into a text file you can edit or search.

  • Free, no signup
  • No upload — runs on your device
  • No watermark
  • Unlimited use

PDF to Text

Processed locally
Drop a PDF here

or click to browse

If nothing comes out, the PDF has no text — and that tells you something

PDFs come in two flavours that look identical on screen. A born-digital PDF, exported from Word or InDesign, contains actual text objects with font references and positions. A scanned PDF contains a photograph of a page, and no text at all. This tool reads the first kind; on the second it correctly returns nothing.

An empty result is therefore diagnostic, not a failure. It tells you the document has never been through OCR, which in turn tells you the file is not searchable, not accessible to screen readers, and not indexable by your document management system. That is worth knowing before you circulate it.

One more wrinkle: PDF stores text as positioned glyphs, not as sentences. A two-column layout is stored column by column, but the extraction order depends on how the generator wrote the objects — which is why extracted text from academic papers sometimes interleaves the columns. Reflowing that reliably requires layout analysis, which no browser tool does well.

How it works

  1. Drop in the PDF
  2. Click Extract text and wait for the pages to be read
  3. Copy the text, or download it as a .txt file
Why nothing uploads. Every operation on this page happens inside your browser using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Your file is read into memory, processed, and offered back as a download. It is never transmitted. Disconnect from the internet after this page loads and the tool keeps working.

Frequently asked questions

Why did I get no text from my PDF?
Because it is a scan — a picture of a page rather than text. Extraction cannot invent characters that are not in the file. You need OCR software to add a text layer first.
Is this OCR?
No. OCR recognises characters in an image. This tool reads text that is already stored in the document, which is faster and perfectly accurate, but only works when the text exists.
Why is the extracted text jumbled or out of order?
PDF stores text as positioned glyphs, not as paragraphs. Multi-column layouts and complex typesetting can extract in an order that reflects how the file was written rather than how it reads.
Does this preserve formatting like bold and headings?
No. The output is plain text. Font, size and weight information exists in the PDF but is discarded, because there is no unambiguous mapping from PDF text styling to a plain text file.
Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
Only if the password restricts editing rather than opening. Files that require a password to open cannot be read at all until unlocked.

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