Extract selectable text from a PDF into plain text. Pick page ranges, copy the result, or download a .txt file. Scanned pages are flagged, and OCR is not included.
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Quick answer: PDF to Text — Extract selectable text Free, no signup, runs in your browser. See below for the interactive tool, 4-step guide and FAQs.
Extract text from a PDF into plain text. Files are processed locally in your browser and never uploaded.
Comma-separated pages and ranges, e.g. 1-3,5. Leave blank for all pages. Numbering starts at 1.
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Use one PDF up to 10 MB and no more than 200 pages. Page ranges are optional. Leave the range blank to extract every page, or enter values such as 1-3,5 to select specific pages. Numbering starts at 1.
No. A scanned page is an image without a text layer, so extraction returns an empty marker for that page. The tool counts and flags pages with no extractable text. It does not run OCR, and it cannot invent words from a picture.
No. pdf.js opens the file in the browser, reads the text objects, and builds the output locally. The PDF is not sent to a server. Site assets, including the PDF engine, must load before extraction can begin.
The output preserves page markers and basic line information from the PDF, but it does not reconstruct columns, tables, headers, or reading order perfectly. Multi-column layouts can interleave, and hyphenation may remain. Check the preview before quoting or publishing the text.
Yes. After extraction, copy the text to the clipboard or download it as a .txt file named after the source PDF. Long documents produce long text blocks, so downloading is usually easier than copying from the preview.
They appear with a page marker and a note that no extractable text was found. The success message also reports how many selected pages were empty. This helps distinguish a scanned page from a page that is simply blank in the source.
PDF to Text reads the text objects inside a PDF and writes them as plain text. It accepts one PDF up to 10 MB and 200 pages, with an optional page range such as 1-3,5. The output includes a marker for each page, a note when a page has no extractable text, and the collected words in reading order as reported by the PDF. It is useful for copying clauses from a contract, moving a report into a notes app, or checking whether a PDF contains a real text layer. It is not an OCR service. A scanned page, a photographed page, or an image-only export returns nothing because there are no character objects to read. The tool reports those pages instead of silently producing an incomplete file.
A born-digital PDF stores characters and font information, so extraction can retrieve words without recognizing pixels. A scanned PDF stores an image, so extraction has no characters to return. Mixed documents can contain both kinds of pages; the page markers make the difference visible. Reading order is another limitation. PDF text is positioned on a canvas rather than stored as a simple paragraph stream, so a two-column report may come out interleaved. Tables can lose their rows, and headers or footers can repeat in awkward places. The tool normalizes excessive spaces and blank lines, but it does not rebuild semantic headings. Always inspect the preview before using extracted text in a quotation, a legal document, or a publication. For image-only pages, use a dedicated OCR application and review its output.
Select a 40-page born-digital report and enter 1-3,5. The tool extracts four pages, labels each one, and reports any page with no text. Copy a short passage into a notes file, or download the full result as a .txt file. If a two-column page comes out jumbled, extract that page alone and compare the preview with the original. If every page is empty, the PDF is probably a scan and needs OCR. The tool does not unlock password-protected files, repair malformed PDFs, preserve bold or italic styling, preserve tables, or recognize text in images. It also does not remove copyrighted material or verify that you have permission to reuse the text. Treat the output as a draft and check it against the source.