PDF to Text
Pull every word out of a PDF's text layer — instant, accurate, and processed entirely in your browser.
How to Extract Text from a PDF
- Upload your PDF — extraction starts automatically, no button to click.
- Watch the status message as it works through each page.
- Review the extracted text in the text box below.
- Click "Copy Text" to copy it to your clipboard, or "Download .txt" to save it as a plain text file.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did I get "No selectable text found"?
This tool reads the PDF's underlying text layer — it can't recognize text inside a scanned image or photo, since there is no text layer to read, just pixels. For scanned documents, use the Image to Text (OCR) tool instead, which is built to recognize characters in images.
Does it preserve the original formatting, like columns or tables?
Not exactly — each page's text items are joined with simple spaces in the order pdf.js reports them, and pages are separated by a blank line. Multi-column layouts or tables may come out in an order that doesn't match the visual layout, since PDFs don't store text in a strict reading order.
Can I extract text from just one page instead of the whole document?
Yes — use the Pages field to enter specific page numbers and ranges, like "1-3, 5, 8-10", and only those pages are extracted. Leave it blank to extract every page.
Is the extracted text editable before I download it?
The textarea is read-only, but you can copy the text and paste it into any text editor to make changes before saving.
How does the word count in the status message get calculated?
It splits the entire extracted text on whitespace and counts the resulting chunks, so it's a straightforward word count across all pages combined, shown once extraction finishes.
What does "Insert page markers" do?
It adds a "--- Page N ---" line before each page's text in the output, so you can tell where one page ends and the next begins — useful when extracting multiple pages and you need to know which text came from where.