❓ You need the text from a PDF but cannot select or copy it. Maybe the PDF is a scanned document, maybe the text selection is restricted, or maybe you just want a clean plain-text version. The PDF to Text tool extracts every word from your PDF in seconds.
What you need
- A PDF file containing text you want to extract
- A web browser
- No account or software to install
Step-by-step guide
Open the PDF to Text tool
Go to the PDF to Text tool. It runs entirely in your browser with no setup required.
Upload your PDF
Click the upload area or drag and drop your PDF. The tool will process the file and extract all readable text content.
Copy or download the extracted text
The extracted text appears in a text area. You can select and copy specific sections, or download the entire text as a file. The text is clean and ready to paste into any document, email, or editor.
Good to know All text extraction happens locally in your browser. Your PDF is never sent to any server, so sensitive documents stay private.
What kind of PDFs does this work with?
Digital (native) PDFs
PDFs created from Word documents, web pages, or any application that generates text-based PDFs. These give the best results because the text is already stored as characters in the file.
Scanned PDFs
PDFs made from scanned paper documents are essentially images. Text extraction from scanned PDFs depends on the tool's OCR capability. Results are generally good for clean scans with standard fonts, but handwriting and very low-quality scans may produce incomplete results.
Mixed PDFs
Some PDFs contain a mix of digital text and scanned images. The tool extracts whatever text data is available in the file structure.
Tip For the best extraction results from scanned documents, make sure the scan is at least 300 DPI and the text is clearly legible. Skewed or blurry scans produce lower quality output.
Common use cases
- Quoting text in an email or document: Extract the exact wording from a PDF report or article.
- Searching content: Once extracted, you can use your text editor's search function to find specific passages.
- Data entry: Pull text from PDF forms or invoices into a spreadsheet.
- Accessibility: Convert PDF content to plain text for screen readers or text-to-speech tools.
- Translation: Extract text, paste it into a translation tool, and translate the content.
Tips for clean results
Check for line breaks: PDF text extraction sometimes inserts line breaks in the middle of sentences because the original PDF uses fixed-width columns. You may need to clean up line breaks in your text editor.
Watch for headers and footers: Repeated headers, footers, and page numbers from the PDF will appear in the extracted text. Delete them manually if they clutter the result.
Tables may lose structure: Text in PDF tables is extracted left to right, top to bottom. The column alignment may not be preserved as plain text. For table data, you might need to manually reorganize it in a spreadsheet.
Important If the PDF is password-protected and restricts copying, the tool may not be able to extract the text. You would need to remove the PDF restriction first.
Frequently asked questions
Can I extract text from just certain pages? The tool extracts text from the entire document. If you only need text from specific pages, use the PDF Page Delete tool first to isolate the pages you want, then extract text from the trimmed file.
Does the formatting carry over? The output is plain text. Bold, italic, colors, and layout are not preserved. You get the raw words and paragraphs.
Can I extract text from an image file? This tool works with PDF files. For extracting text from standalone images (JPG, PNG), you would need a dedicated OCR tool.
Next steps
Now that you have the text, you might want to go back to the original PDF and remove unnecessary pages, compress it, or clean its metadata before sharing.