PDF to Text

What is PDF to Text?

PDF to Text extracts the words stored in a PDF and gives them to you as plain text. You can copy the result into an e-mail, a word processor or a spreadsheet, search it, translate it, or feed it to another program. Formatting such as fonts, colors and columns is removed, leaving clean, editable text in reading order, line by line.

Read locally, never uploaded

The text is read by PDF.js, the open-source engine behind Firefox's PDF viewer, running entirely in your browser. The document never leaves your device and nothing is stored after you close the page. That makes the tool suitable for contracts, payslips, bank statements and other documents you would not want to send to an unknown server.

How to extract text from a PDF

1. Drop your PDF onto the drop zone or click Choose file. Extraction starts immediately and shows its progress page by page.
2. Read the result in the text box. Tick Mark where each page starts to insert a line such as --- Page 3 --- before every page; untick it for continuous text.
3. Click Copy to put the text on your clipboard, or Download to save it as a UTF-8 .txt file that opens in any editor.

For very long documents the box previews the first 200,000 characters to keep the page fast, while the downloaded file always contains the complete text.

What it can and cannot do

The tool reads the text layer that programs such as Word, LibreOffice, Google Docs or a browser's “Save as PDF” put inside the file. A scanned document, on the other hand, is just a picture of each page and has no text layer. In that case the tool warns you that little or no text was found; recognising text inside images (OCR) is not available.

Examples

• Copy a clause from a contract into an e-mail without retyping it.
• Paste the contents of a report into a translation tool.
• Search a long manual for a term with your editor's find function.
• Collect the text of articles to quote them in your own notes.

Frequently asked questions

Why are some words joined or split?

PDF stores text as positioned fragments, not as sentences. Most documents come out correctly, but unusual layouts – several columns, tables or text along curves – can produce line breaks in unexpected places.

Are accents and other alphabets supported?

Yes. The text is decoded with full Unicode support, so accented letters and non-Latin scripts are extracted as long as the PDF stores them correctly.