PDF to Text
Read the text out of a document and put it in an editable box. Tidy it up there if you need to, then copy it or save it as a text file.
Runs entirely in your browser. Your files are never uploaded.
How to use PDF to Text
- 1Pick a PDF, or drag it onto the box above.
- 2Press Extract text and wait a moment.
- 3Edit what comes out, if it needs it.
- 4Copy it, or download it as a .txt file.
Rebuilding something a PDF never stored
A PDF does not contain paragraphs, or even lines. It contains glyphs with coordinates. What you read as a line is a row of characters that happen to share a vertical position, and what you read as a paragraph is a slightly larger gap before the next one.
So extraction is reconstruction. Fragments sharing a baseline are joined into a line, lines are ordered down the page, and a gap bigger than about one and a half line heights starts a new paragraph. Spacing within a line is worked out from the distance between fragments, because PDFs regularly position words without putting any space characters between them.
Where it gets it wrong
Multi-column layouts. Reading order here is top to bottom, then left to right, so an academic paper or a newsletter comes out with its columns interleaved line by line. Detecting columns reliably is a much harder problem than it appears, and getting it wrong scrambles documents that would otherwise have been merely imperfect, so this tool does not guess.
Tables lose their structure, because a table in a PDF is just text at positions. Headers and footers appear on every page. Hyphenated words broken across lines stay broken.
None of this makes the output useless. It means you should read what comes out rather than pasting it straight into something that matters.
Scanned documents have no text to extract
If a PDF came from a scanner or a photograph, its pages are images. There is no text layer, so nothing comes out, and the tool says so rather than handing you an empty box with no explanation. Getting words out of that needs optical character recognition, which is a different job and a different tool.
Editing before you save
The box is editable, which is there for the small repairs extraction always needs: a stray header, a line that broke in the wrong place, the page markers if you turned them on and then decided against them. What you download is whatever is in the box when you press the button, not what came out of the document.
Limits
- 100 MB per file.
- Password-protected PDFs need unlocking first.
- Multi-column pages come out with the columns interleaved.
- Tables lose their rows and columns.
- Scanned pages produce nothing: they need OCR.
- Plain text out. No formatting, images or links.
Frequently asked questions
- Nothing came out of my PDF. Why?
- It is almost certainly a scan, so its pages are pictures of text rather than text. The tool tells you when it sees this. OCR is what reads that kind of document.
- Why is the text out of order?
- Probably a multi-column layout. Reading order runs down the page and then across, so two columns come out interleaved. Extracting one column at a time, by page, is the usual workaround.
- Can I keep the formatting?
- No, this produces plain text. Bold, headings and tables are presentation, and none of it survives. For layout you want the original document or a PDF editor.
- Is my document uploaded to read the text?
- No. The PDF engine runs in your browser, so the document and its text both stay on your device.