Extract text from PDF
Turn it into plain text with the lines and paragraphs intact.
- Zero-transmission processing
- No watermark
- Limited daily trial
- Unlimited on Pro
Drop your PDFs here
or pick them from your device
Your files are never transmitted. Nothing is uploaded.
Good to know
- Accepts
- Files at once
- One at a time
- Transmission
- None — nothing is uploaded.
Chain it
Run this tool and the next one back to back — nothing to download in between.
How to do it
- 1
Add your file
Add the PDF you want the words out of. It has to be a PDF with real text — if you cannot select the words in a reader, run OCR on it first.
- 2
Set it up the way you want
Choose whether to keep the line layout or let the text flow. Flowing suits reading and further editing; keeping lines suits data you will process, where the position of things carries meaning.
- 3
Download the result
Download the plain text. It opens anywhere, weighs almost nothing and can be searched, scripted over or pasted wherever you need it.
Questions about Extract text from PDF
- Why is the order sometimes wrong?
- Because a PDF stores text at coordinates rather than in reading order. A two-column page is a well-known trap: naively read, the columns interleave. The tool reconstructs reading order from position, which is right nearly always and occasionally wrong on unusual layouts.
- Nothing came out. What happened?
- Almost certainly a scan — a picture of text with no text layer. The tool tells you this instead of handing you an empty file, because an empty download looks like a broken tool rather than a scanned document.
- Is my document uploaded?
- No. The text is extracted and written to a file without ever being transmitted. Nothing is uploaded at any point.