EXTRACT
Drop in a PDF and get its text back — all of it, or just the pages you name.
Up to 100 MB — it never leaves your device
Extracted text
No text came out of these pages. That almost always means the PDF is a scan — the pages are images, and there is no text layer to extract. Reading those needs OCR, which this tool does not do.
the text layer
A PDF made from a word processor, a browser or a design tool carries its text as text — the letters are stored as characters with positions, which is why you can select them in a reader. This tool reads that layer page by page and hands it back as plain text you can paste anywhere.
A scanned PDF is a different animal. Every page is a photograph of paper, so there are no characters to read and nothing comes out. That is not a failure of the extraction — there is genuinely no text in the file, and getting it needs optical character recognition rather than reading.
three steps
It is parsed in the browser with the same engine that renders our PDF previews. Nothing is uploaded, so a contract or an invoice stays on your machine.
Empty means the whole document. Otherwise name them the same way you would in a print dialog — 1-3, 5, 8- — and only those pages are read. Turn on page marks to keep track of where each one began.
Copy puts the text on your clipboard for a chat or an editor. Download writes a UTF-8 .txt next to the original, which is the safer route for anything long.
quick answers
The PDF is almost certainly a scan, so its pages are images with no text layer. You can tell by opening it in any reader and trying to select a word: if the cursor will not grab it, there is nothing here to extract.
No. It reads text that is already in the file rather than recognising letters in a picture. OCR needs a model that would have to be downloaded before the first page could be read, which is a different tool.
Plain text has no columns, tables or margins. Line breaks follow what the PDF itself marks as the end of a line, and everything else — a two-column paper, a table of figures — flattens into running text.
Yes, because they are text on the page like any other. If you are pulling body copy out of a long report, expect a header or a footer between page boundaries.
It cannot be opened here. Remove the password in the application that made it or in your PDF reader, then run the unlocked copy through this tool.
Yes, including PDFs that rely on predefined character maps rather than embedding a font. The .txt is written as UTF-8, so the characters survive the round trip.
No. The file is read in your browser and the text never leaves the page. There is no server in this tool to send a document to.
Yes — free with no watermark.
