PDF to Text
Drop a PDF here or click to choose
Choose a PDF. If you can highlight the words in a viewer, this page can read them.
Read the words out of a PDF into a box you can edit, copy, or save as TXT. Line breaks follow the visual lines, not a reflowed article.
How to use
- Choose a PDF. Password-protected files stop here. The password is not removed or guessed.
- Extract. Pages are labeled Page 1, Page 2, and so on. Edit the box if you want to clean a line before you copy it.
- Copy or download TXT. Download uses whatever is in the box, including your edits.
Selectable text versus a scan
A digital PDF stores character positions. Those positions are grouped into lines. A wide gap becomes a space. It is not a word processor, so a justified paragraph may still look a little loose, but the words should be the words.
A phone photo saved as PDF often has no characters at all. The honest result is a line that says there is no selectable text. English OCR is optional and imperfect. It will not read handwriting or non-English pages reliably.
Some PDFs draw letters as curves or as a broken encoding. A viewer may show the right word while the text layer says something else. When that happens, this tool reports the text layer, not a visual guess, unless OCR is on for an empty page.
Questions
Why does copying in my PDF app work, but this looks empty?
Your viewer may be running its own OCR and not showing you. This page does not hide that step. Turn on English OCR if you want a guess, and expect mistakes.
Can I get a Word file instead?
Yes. PDF to Word uses the same text grouping and saves DOCX. Use that if you want to keep editing in Word.
Does the text leave my computer?
The PDF does not. OCR downloads a language file for English the first time you use it. The page image for OCR stays in the tab.