Extract the Text
Drag & drop your PDF here
PDF only
Pull the text layer of a document into a plain .txt file you can search, paste or process.
Private · Fast · No watermark
Drag & drop your PDF here
PDF only
A PDF exported from a word processor stores its words as text, positioned on the page. A PDF produced by a scanner stores a photograph of a page and nothing else. On screen they look the same, and you can tell them apart by trying to select a word.
This tool reads the first kind. When there is nothing to read it says so, instead of handing back an empty file you would have to diagnose yourself.
This is the right tool for searching, quoting and feeding text into something else. It is not a layout conversion, and a two column report will read as two columns interleaved.
Because the document is a scan or an export made entirely of images. There is nothing to extract. Recognizing words in a picture is OCR, which is a different operation and not offered yet.
No. The output is the text in storage order with page breaks kept. Columns and tables are flattened into running text, which is what plain text can hold.
It bounds the work and the response on a long document. Extract the pages you need with Split PDF first if the file is longer.
UTF-8, so accented and non-Latin characters that exist in the document survive the round trip.
No. The document is read and never rewritten. What you get back is a separate text file.