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PDF Tools

PDF to Text

Extract the text from a PDF page by page, then copy it or download it as a .txt file. Works on PDFs that contain real text.

Choose a PDF and its text appears below, ready to copy or download.

Drag & drop a PDF here, or click to choose

Text is extracted in your browser - the file is never uploaded.

Scanned PDFs are pictures of pages and contain no text to extract - they need OCR software instead.

Copy All the Text Out of a PDF

Copying text from a PDF viewer often breaks lines in the wrong places or misses pages. This tool reads the text from every page in your browser and shows it in one box, ready to copy or download as a .txt file.

How to Use It

  1. Choose a PDF. The text appears below.
  2. Tick Mark where each page starts to keep page breaks visible.
  3. Tick Join lines into paragraphs to remove the line breaks that PDFs add at the end of each printed line.
  4. Copy the text or download it.

What to Do Next with the Text

Limitations

Only PDFs that contain real text work. A scanned document is a picture of a page with no text inside, so nothing (or very little) comes out - that needs OCR software. Tables and multi-column layouts may come out in reading order that differs from the page. Some PDFs restrict copying; their text may still be extracted, so respect the document's licence.

Frequently Asked Questions

A scanned PDF is a picture of each page, with no text stored inside. Extracting words from it needs OCR (optical character recognition), which this tool does not do.

PDFs store text line by line as it was printed. Tick "Join lines into paragraphs" to merge those lines back into normal paragraphs.

No. The text is extracted by pdf.js in your browser, and nothing is sent to a server.
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