PDF to Text Extractor
Extract all text from any PDF file. Edit, copy, or download as .txt — entirely in your browser.
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Drop your PDF here
or click to browse files
Accepts: PDFdocument.pdf
Works only with text-based PDFs. Scanned documents are images and have no extractable text.
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Extracting text...
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Extracted Text
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How to extract text from a PDF
- Upload your PDF by clicking the drop zone or dragging the file onto it.
- Click Extract Text. Each page is processed and text is collected in reading order.
- The extracted text appears in an editable text area. You can click anywhere to edit the content.
- Click Copy All to copy to clipboard, or Download .txt to save as a plain text file. A Markdown download is also available.
What is a scanned PDF and why can't I extract text?
A scanned PDF is created by photographing or scanning a physical document and saving it as an image inside a PDF wrapper. The pages look like text but are actually pixel images — there are no characters for software to read. To extract text from scanned PDFs, you need OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software such as Adobe Acrobat, ABBYY FineReader, or Google Drive's built-in OCR feature. Text-based PDFs, on the other hand, contain actual character data that tools like this one can extract directly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Upload your PDF and click Extract Text. The text appears in an editable box — click Copy All to copy it to your clipboard, or download as .txt.
PDFs store text as positioned items, not paragraphs. Multi-column layouts or non-standard fonts may produce imperfect output. You can edit the text in the output box.
No. Scanned PDFs contain images, not readable text. You need OCR software (like Adobe Acrobat or Google Drive) to extract text from scanned documents.