PDF to Text Converter

Extract all text from your PDF. Scanned/image-only PDFs have no text layer, so output may be empty.

When should you use this?

Use this when you need to copy the text from a PDF to use elsewhere (an email, a note, a search); it works fast on PDFs that already have a text layer.

When shouldn't you use this?

If the PDF is a scanned image (you can't select the text), this tool will return nothing useful, you'll need an OCR tool first.

Step-by-step

First open the PDF in a reader and try to select some text with your mouse. If you can, the file has a text layer and this tool will work.
Choose the document in the PDF file field.
Click Extract text.
Copy the extracted text to wherever you need it, and compare the first few paragraphs with the original to make sure it came through correctly.

Example

You need to quote one clause from a 40-page regulation PDF. Extract the text, paste it into a text editor, and use search to jump straight to the word you're after. The same approach works when you want a word count for an article, need to run the text through a translation tool, or want to drop key passages into your notes app. It beats selecting and copying page by page in a reader, especially on long documents.

How does text extraction from PDF work?

In a PDF that contains text, the writing is stored as selectable characters and the tool reads them page by page into plain text. In scanned documents the page is only an image with no readable text, so nothing can be extracted from such files. For those you first need optical character recognition (OCR).

Tips when extracting text

Columns, tables and footers can come out in a mixed order; review the result.
PDFs made with unusual fonts or encodings may show some garbled characters.
If your document is scanned, try the image OCR tool.
For confidential documents the file is processed in your browser; still keep the extracted text somewhere safe.

Things to keep in mind

Multi-column pages, like newspapers or academic papers, sometimes come out with the columns interleaved. If an unrelated sentence shows up mid-paragraph, that's why.
Line breaks usually follow the PDF's layout, so a single sentence may be split over several lines. Clean those up before reusing the text.
Some PDFs encode special characters badly, and accented letters can turn into odd symbols. That comes from how the file was made, not from the extraction.
Tables become plain text and lose their rows and columns. If you need the table data, try the PDF to Excel tool.

Frequently asked questions

Are my files uploaded to a server?

No. This tool runs entirely in your browser; your PDF file is never sent to a server.

Is there a file size limit?

There's no fixed limit, but very large files may process more slowly depending on your browser's available memory.

Does this work on password-protected PDFs?

No — password-protected PDFs can't be opened, so you'll need to remove the password first.