Extract Text from PDF
Scanned PDFs contain pictures, not text, so nothing can be extracted — use Image to Text (OCR) for those.
Text out of a PDF, in order
Selecting and copying text in a PDF viewer often breaks lines in odd places or mixes columns. This tool reads where each piece of text sits on the page (using PDF.js), rebuilds lines top to bottom, left to right, and can join them into paragraphs. The result appears in an editable box; copy it or save it as a UTF-8 TXT file.
Line handling
- Join into paragraphs — PDFs store text line by line, so a plain copy has a line break in the middle of every sentence. This option looks at spacing and font size to join lines of the same paragraph and puts a blank line between paragraphs. Lines starting with numbers or bullets begin new paragraphs.
- Keep PDF lines — for poems, tables, addresses and anything where line breaks matter.
When no text comes out
Scanned or photographed PDFs are just images. Convert the pages to images (PDF to JPG) and read them with Image to Text (OCR). Some PDFs use unusual font encodings and produce garbled symbols — OCR is the fallback there too.
Tables come out as lines of text with cells separated by spaces; use PDF Table to Excel to keep the grid, or PDF to Word to edit the document. Multi-column layouts (newspapers, papers) can mix lines from neighboring columns, so check the result. Nothing is uploaded.
The header above the result shows the number of pages and characters (excluding spaces) — handy for checking the length of a manuscript.
Frequently asked questions
The text is out of order.
In PDFs with two or more columns, text at the same height in different columns can merge into one line. Fix the parts you need by hand.
The TXT file looks garbled in my editor.
It's saved as UTF-8 with a BOM, which Notepad, Word and modern editors open correctly. In very old software, choose UTF-8 when opening.
Can I extract text from copyrighted documents?
The tool just extracts text technically. Respect copyright when you share or publish what you extract.
Related tools
- PDF to WordTurn a text PDF into an editable Word (docx) file with paragraphs and headings
- Image to Text (OCR)Extract English (and Korean) text from photos and screenshots — runs in your browser
- PDF Table to ExcelRebuild tables from text-based PDFs as .xlsx — numbers converted automatically
- Merge PDFCombine PDFs in any order and pick page ranges from each file
- Split PDFSplit by page ranges, every N pages or into single pages — download as ZIP
- Extract PDF PagesClick thumbnails or type page numbers to save them as a new PDF