PDF to Text

PDF to Text extracts the text from a PDF in your browser, page by page, so you can copy it into an email, a document, a spreadsheet or another tool. Line breaks are kept as they appear on the page, or you can join wrapped lines into flowing paragraphs, and optional markers show where each page starts. You get a word and character count, a copy button and a .txt download. The file is never uploaded. Scanned PDFs that contain only pictures of pages have no text to extract, and OCR is not included.

How to use the PDF to text

1. 1 Open your PDFDrop a PDF onto the tool or click to choose one. The text is read straight away, page by page, on your own device.
2. 2 Check the resultThe extracted text appears in the box with a word, character and page count. A warning appears if some pages have no text layer.
3. 3 Choose line breaksKeep line breaks to match the page layout, or untick the option to join lines into paragraphs for pasting into a document.
4. 4 Choose page markersLeave Mark page breaks on to show where each page begins, or turn it off for one continuous block of text.
5. 5 Copy or downloadPress Copy text to put it on the clipboard, or Download .txt to save a plain text file.

Turn a PDF into plain text

Copying text out of a PDF reader is often more frustrating than it should be. Selections jump across columns, every line ends with a hard break, headers and footers get mixed in, and selecting forty pages by dragging is slow. PDF to Text reads the text layer of the whole document in one go and lays it out as plain text, so you can paste it wherever you need it, search it, or feed it into another tool such as our Word Counter or Readability Checker.

Typical uses include quoting from a report or judgment, pulling clauses out of a contract for comparison, getting the words of a brochure or menu into a website editor, reusing your own old documents when the original Word file has been lost, and preparing text for translation. Because the output is plain text, all formatting such as fonts, bold, colours and images is removed, which is usually exactly what you want when the text is going somewhere else.

How the extraction works

A PDF does not store text as paragraphs the way a word processor does. It stores small runs of characters, each with a position on the page. To rebuild readable text, the tool reads every run with the open-source PDF.js library, the same engine Firefox uses to show PDFs, and puts them back together line by line according to their position. A larger gap between lines is treated as the end of a paragraph and becomes a blank line, and a gap between runs on the same line becomes a space.

The result follows the order in which the text is stored, which for most documents is the natural reading order. Simple letters, reports, statements, articles and exported Word or Google Docs files usually come out very cleanly.

• Keep line breaks gives you the lines exactly as they are on the page, which suits addresses, poetry, lists and tables.
• Joining lines turns wrapped lines back into paragraphs and rejoins words that were hyphenated at the end of a line.
• Page markers such as --- Page 3 --- make it easy to find where a quote came from.

Scanned PDFs and why some have no text

Not every PDF contains text. When paper is scanned, or a document is photographed with a phone, each page is usually saved as a picture. It looks like text to you, but to a computer it is just pixels, and there is nothing for this tool to extract. If the result is empty, or a warning says that certain pages have no text layer, that is almost always why. A quick test is to open the PDF in any reader and try to select a single word: if you cannot, the page is an image.

Turning images of text into real text needs OCR, optical character recognition, which this tool deliberately does not include. Many scanning apps and multifunction printers have a searchable PDF or OCR option that adds a hidden text layer at the time of scanning, and full desktop PDF programs can run OCR on an existing file. Once a document has a text layer, it will work here.

Columns, tables and other tricky layouts

Because PDFs only record where characters sit, complex layouts can come out in an unexpected order. Text in two or three columns is sometimes read across the columns rather than down each one, especially in newsletters and academic papers. Tables lose their grid and become rows of words separated by spaces. Headers, footers, page numbers and footnotes appear wherever they are stored, often at the start or end of each page.

For most purposes a little tidying is all that is needed. Leave Mark page breaks switched on so you can see where headers and footers fall, and remove them in your editor. For tables you intend to analyse, it can be quicker to copy one table at a time from your PDF reader, or to ask the sender for the original spreadsheet. Some PDFs also use unusual font encodings that make text come out as nonsense characters; that is a property of how the file was made, and no extraction tool can fully fix it without OCR.

Private extraction in your browser

The documents people want to extract text from are frequently contracts, medical letters, bank statements, academic work and other material that should not be uploaded to a random website. PDF to Text runs entirely in your browser: the file is opened by JavaScript on your own device, the text is assembled locally, and the copy and download buttons work without contacting any server. There is no account, no limit and no record of what you extracted.

Very large PDFs take a little longer, because every page is processed on your device, and progress is shown as each page is read. Password-protected files must be unlocked with the program that applied the password before they can be read.

Using the extracted text responsibly

Extracting text does not change who owns it. Copyright still applies to reports, articles, books and other published material, so quote with attribution and within the limits of fair dealing for purposes such as criticism, review, quotation or private study. If you are reusing someone else's content commercially, get permission first.

When you paste extracted text into another system, check names, figures and dates against the original PDF, particularly in contracts and financial documents, because an occasional ligature or symbol can come out differently. To count words or check reading level, paste the text into our Word Counter or Readability Checker. To get images of pages instead of text, use PDF to JPG.

Getting the cleanest result

A few habits make extracted text much easier to work with. If the source document is available as an original file, such as a Word document or a web page, start from that instead, because it already contains the text and structure. If you only have the PDF, choose the version exported directly from the authoring program rather than a scanned or printed copy, since exported PDFs always have a proper text layer.

Decide on line breaks before you paste. Keep them for anything where the layout carries meaning, such as addresses, lists and tables, and join them for running prose that will be reflowed in a new document. Then do a quick search for odd characters, double spaces or stray page numbers, and tidy them in one pass.

Examples you can copy

--- Page 1 ---
Annual Report 2025

Introduction
This report covers the twelve months to 31 March.

--- Page 2 ---
...

Before: This report covers the twelve months to 31
March and sets out the main achieve-
ments of the year.

After:  This report covers the twelve months to 31 March and sets out the main achievements of the year.

pdftotext -layout report.pdf report.txt

pdftotext -f 3 -l 5 report.pdf pages.txt

Common mistakes to avoid

Frequently asked questions