Copy the text out of a PDF
Quotes from a report, a clause of a contract for an email, a table that has to reach a spreadsheet: selecting text in a PDF viewer often drags along odd line breaks and page numbers. This page reads the text stored in the PDF, page by page, and puts it in a box you can copy or save as a .txt file. The PDF is read in your browser and never uploaded.
Extract text from a PDF in five steps
- Drop the PDF onto the drop zone or click it to choose the file. On first use the page reader loads, about half a megabyte.
- Type the pages you want, for example
1-3, 7, or leave the field empty to read every page. - Choose how lines are handled: keep them as they are in the PDF, or join them into paragraphs for running text. Switch on the page markers if you need to see where each page starts.
- Press Extract text. A progress line shows the page being read, and Cancel stops the run.
- Copy the text or download it as a .txt file. Changing the line option or the markers updates the result at once, without reading the PDF again.
Scans and what the tool cannot read
The tool reads text that is stored in the PDF. A scanned page is only a picture, so it gives nothing, and the result says how many pages had no text. Character recognition (OCR) needs large models, which would break the small size of this site, so run a scan through an OCR program first. PDFs made from Word, a web page or an export from an app usually carry real text.
Reading order, columns and tables
A PDF stores positioned text fragments, not paragraphs. The tool joins fragments on the same baseline, adds a space where the gap is wide enough and turns a bigger vertical gap into a blank line. Columns, tables, headers, footers and footnotes can come out in a different order than they look on the page. A hyphen at the end of a line stays where it is.
Size limits and where the file goes
A PDF can have up to 100 MB. An encrypted PDF asks for its password, which is used only in memory. The page reader is pdf.js, served from this site, and no request carries the content of your document.