Extract Text from PDF
Extract all readable text content from PDF files and copy it as plain text. Perfect for research, data extraction, and content repurposing.
Drop your PDF here or browse
Works with text-based PDFs. Scanned/image PDFs require OCR.
📋 How to Use
- Upload your PDF file by clicking "Choose File".
- Select the extraction mode: "All Text" for a single combined output, or "Per Page" to see text separated by page.
- Click "Extract Text" to process the PDF.
- View the extracted text directly in your browser.
- Copy the text to your clipboard or click "Download as TXT" to save it as a text file.
Note: This tool only works with text-based PDFs. Scanned image PDFs cannot be processed — you will receive a message if no extractable text is found.
About This Tool
Extract Text from PDF — Free PDF Text Extractor
Need to copy text from a PDF but find it difficult to select, or want to extract all the text content at once? Our free online PDF Text Extractor lets you pull all readable text from any PDF file and view it as clean, formatted plain text — ready to copy, search, edit, or download.
What is PDF Text Extraction?
PDF files can store text in two fundamentally different ways:
Text-based PDFs: These contain actual text data embedded in the file. When you click and drag to select text in a PDF viewer, you are interacting with this embedded text. Text-based PDFs are created by word processors (like Microsoft Word or Google Docs), desktop publishing software, and applications that export directly to PDF.
Image-based PDFs (scanned documents): These contain scanned photographs of pages, with no actual text data. The "text" you see is just an image of text. Text cannot be extracted from image-based PDFs without OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology.
Our tool extracts text from text-based PDFs. For scanned PDFs, you would need an OCR tool.
Why Extract Text from a PDF?
Research and note-taking: Extract text from academic papers, reports, or books so you can search through it, highlight key passages, and take notes without the constraints of a PDF viewer.
Data extraction and automation: Extract structured data from PDF invoices, reports, or tables for processing in spreadsheets, databases, or scripts.
Content repurposing: Transform the text content of a PDF document into a format you can edit, translate, or reformat for a website, blog post, or presentation.
Accessibility: Convert PDF text to a format that works better with screen readers, text-to-speech tools, or braille readers.
Search and indexing: Extract text to make PDF content searchable in databases or search engines.
Translation: Extract text to send to translation services or machine translation tools.
Legal and compliance: Extract text from legal documents for keyword searching, clause analysis, or compliance checking.
Features of Our PDF Text Extractor
Two extraction modes:
- All Text: Extracts and combines all text from the entire PDF into a single block, making it easy to read or search through the complete content.
- Per Page: Extracts text page by page, with clear page separators, allowing you to identify exactly where each piece of content appears in the original document.
Download as TXT: After extracting, download the text as a .txt file for use in text editors, word processors, or code editors.
Page count display: Shows the total number of pages detected in the PDF so you know how large the document is.
In-browser preview: View all extracted text directly in your browser before downloading.
Copy to clipboard: Easily copy the extracted text with one click.
Limitations to Be Aware Of
- Scanned PDFs: If the PDF was created by scanning physical pages, there is no embedded text to extract. The tool will inform you that no extractable text was found.
- Text in images: Text that is part of an embedded image (such as a logo or screenshot) cannot be extracted.
- Complex layouts: PDFs with complex multi-column layouts, tables, or non-linear reading orders may have text extracted in a different order than expected.
- Special characters: Some PDFs use non-standard font encoding that may cause certain characters to appear incorrectly in the extracted text.
- Encrypted PDFs: Password-protected PDFs must be unlocked before text can be extracted. Use our PDF Unlock tool first.
Best Practices
- Check the output carefully: Always review the extracted text for formatting issues, especially with complex layouts.
- Use per-page mode for large documents: For long PDFs, extracting page by page makes it easier to navigate and find specific content.
- Combine with other tools: Use extracted text with our text case converter, word counter, or other text tools for further processing.
- For scanned PDFs: Use an OCR service (Optical Character Recognition) to convert scanned images to text before extraction.