PDF to Text Extractor
Copying from a PDF reader tends to go badly: you get the header and footer of every page, the columns interleaved, and line breaks in the middle of sentences. This tool reads the document's text layer directly and gives you the whole thing in one editable box, ready to paste into a note, a translator or a spreadsheet. Turn on paragraph reflow and the line wrapping the layout baked in is undone — wrapped lines are rejoined, hyphenated words are put back together, and bullets and numbered items are left where they are. Page markers can be kept so you still know where each page began, or dropped for clean prose. If the PDF is a scan there is no text to find, and the tool says so instead of handing you an empty box. Everything is read inside your browser, so a contract or a payslip never leaves the machine.
How to use
- Drop a PDF onto the box, or click it to pick a file.
- Leave the scope on "All pages", or switch to "Page range" and enter something like `1-3, 5`.
- Decide whether to keep the `--- Page n ---` markers, and whether to reflow paragraphs.
- Press Extract, then copy the text or download it as a .txt file.
Frequently asked questions
- Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
- No. The document is opened and read entirely inside your browser tab. Nothing is sent to a server, and closing the tab leaves no copy behind.
- Nothing came out — the PDF clearly has text in it.
- Then it is almost certainly a scan: a picture of a page, with no text layer for a reader to select. Extracting words from that needs OCR, which this tool does not do. You can still convert the pages to images and run them through an OCR tool.
- What does "reflow paragraphs" actually change?
- A PDF stores each visual line separately, so a paragraph arrives broken every 80-odd characters. Reflow rejoins lines that do not end at a sentence boundary, repairs words split across a line by a hyphen, and leaves blank lines, bullets and numbered items alone.
- Why is the text in a two-column document interleaved?
- The text comes out in the order the document stores it, which for most multi-column layouts is column by column, but not always. Extracting a range of one page at a time makes it easier to see what happened and fix it.
- Does the layout — tables, spacing, bold — survive?
- No. This produces plain text: the words in reading order, with line and page breaks. Table cells come out as ordinary runs of text, and every font style is dropped.
Guides on this topic
Related tools
PDF to Image Converter
Turn each page of a PDF into a PNG, JPEG or WebP image at the resolution you choose, then download them one by one or as a ZIP. Nothing is uploaded.
Number to Words
Spell out any number in English, Korean, or Japanese — for cheques, contracts, or just clarity.
CSS Text Shadow Generator (Multi-Layer)
Stack as many text-shadow layers as you want — neon glow, 3D lift, outline, long shadow — live preview plus copy-ready CSS.
PDF Compressor
Shrink a PDF by re-encoding the images inside it. Text stays selectable and searchable. Nothing is uploaded.
PDF Page Extractor
Drop a PDF and pull just the pages you want — `1-3, 5, 7-10` — into a fresh PDF. All in your browser, no upload.
Markdown → Plain Text
Strip all Markdown formatting and keep readable plain text — useful for previews, summaries, email, character counts.