What does this tool do?
It pulls every piece of selectable text out of a PDF and puts it in one plain-text box, ready to copy or download as a .txt file. Page markers show where each page begins, and you can turn them off when you want one clean, uninterrupted stream of text.
How to extract text from a PDF
- Add the PDF; extraction starts in your browser as soon as you click the button.
- Watch the per-page progress for longer documents.
- Copy the result straight to your clipboard, or download it as a .txt named after your file.
What it's useful for
Quoting from reports and papers without retyping. Feeding a document's contents into a translation tool, a text-to-speech reader, or a word counter. Getting clean text into notes apps that mangle PDF paste formatting. Indexing and searching your own archive. Reusing the words from an old flyer or menu whose source file is long gone. The .txt output is the simplest, most portable format there is — everything opens it.
The one big limitation: scanned PDFs
This tool reads the text layer that lives inside digitally-created PDFs — exports from Word, invoices, e-tickets, reports. Scanned documents and photographed pages usually have no text layer: each page is just a picture, and extraction will come back nearly empty. That's not a bug, it's the file. For scans you need optical character recognition, which reads the pixels themselves — an OCR tool is planned for this site's image section.
Local extraction, private by default
Text is read by Mozilla's pdf.js engine running inside this page. The document is never uploaded, so extracting from contracts, statements and internal reports doesn't put their contents on anyone's server. Large files take a few seconds of local processing instead of an upload-queue wait.
Tips
- Layout is flattened: multi-column pages read top-to-bottom, left-to-right, and tables lose their grid. For structured data, copy from the source app instead.
- If a "PDF" yields no text but looks full of words, it's a scan — OCR is what you need.