PDF to text online

How to extract text from a PDF

1. Choose a PDF file.
2. Click Extract text.
3. Review the preview and word count shown in the result.
4. Download the full text as a .txt file.
5. If the preview looks empty or garbled, read the limitations section below; the PDF may be a scanned image rather than real text.

This reads the actual text objects embedded in the PDF. If your PDF is a scanned image of a document (a picture of text, not real text), there is no text to extract, since the words exist only as pixels in an image.

What this does and how it works

This tool uses pdf.js, loaded locally from this site, to open the PDF and read each page's text content directly from the file's internal text objects, in the order those objects appear in the page. It then joins the text from all pages together, separated by blank lines, and offers the result as a preview and a downloadable .txt file. This works because a normal PDF (one created from a word processor, web page, or other digital source) stores its text as actual character data, not as a picture.

Best practices

• Use this on PDFs with real text, such as ones exported from a word processor, generated from a web page, or created by most modern software.
• Check the preview before relying on the full download, since spacing and line breaks from the original layout (especially multi-column layouts or tables) don't always translate perfectly to plain text.
• Use a word count check afterward with the site's word counter if you need to confirm the extracted text's length.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Expecting text from a scanned document. If a PDF was created by scanning a paper document (without OCR), the pages are images, and there is no text data to extract; the result will be empty or near-empty.
• Expecting perfectly preserved formatting. Plain text extraction cannot represent bold, italics, tables, or multi-column layout the way the original page displayed them.
• Assuming reading order always matches visual order. Complex layouts (multi-column pages, text boxes, sidebars) can extract in an order that doesn't match how a human would read the page visually.

Real-world use cases

• Pulling text out of a report to paste into another document or an email.
• Getting a quick word count or content check on a PDF without opening a full PDF editor.
• Preparing PDF content for a text-based tool, like a summarizer, translator, or search index.
• Checking whether a PDF actually contains real text or is a scanned image, since an empty extraction result is itself useful information.

Supported formats

Input: a single standard, non-encrypted PDF file with real (non-scanned) text content. Output: plain text, previewed on the page and downloadable as a .txt file. This tool does not perform OCR (optical character recognition) to read text out of scanned images.

Worked example: a 3-page PDF with 900 words total

A 3-page report with roughly 300 words per page produces one combined text file after extraction, with each page's text separated by a blank line, and a word count (around 900) shown in the result summary. This is useful as a quick sanity check that extraction worked and captured a reasonable amount of content, before downloading and using the full text elsewhere.

Limitations

This tool cannot open password-protected or encrypted PDFs. It cannot extract text from scanned image pages, since there is no OCR step; a scanned PDF will return little or no text even though the page visually contains words. Complex multi-column layouts, tables, and text boxes may extract in an order that doesn't match natural reading order, since extraction generally follows the order text objects appear in the underlying file, not always visual reading order.

Privacy

Your PDF is read and its text extracted locally in your browser using the pdf.js JavaScript library loaded from this site. Files are not uploaded to a server. See the privacy policy for full detail.

Troubleshooting

• If the result is empty or nearly empty, your PDF is likely a scanned image without real text; this tool does not include OCR.
• If line breaks or spacing look wrong, that's expected for complex layouts; plain text extraction cannot fully preserve visual formatting.
• If you need an image of the page instead of text, use PDF to JPG.

How to tell if your PDF has real text or is a scanned image

Before running extraction, there's a quick way to check: open the PDF in any viewer and try to select a word or a line of text with your mouse. If a normal text-selection highlight appears and you can copy the text, the page has real text data and this tool will work well. If clicking and dragging instead selects the whole page as one image, or nothing happens at all, the page is a scanned image with no underlying text, and extraction will return little or nothing for that page, which is expected behavior rather than a tool failure.

Conclusion

Use this tool to pull real text content out of a PDF quickly, for pasting elsewhere or checking length. It cannot read scanned documents without real text. For a visual image of a page instead, use PDF to JPG; to check the extracted text's word count in more detail, use the word counter.