PDF to Text
Pull the selectable text out of a PDF, browse it page by page, search within it, and copy or download the result — all inside your browser.
Drop a text-based PDF here
How PDF text extraction works
A PDF to Text tool reads the text layer already stored inside a PDF — the same characters you could select and copy by hand — and gathers it into a plain-text result. This tool does that for every page at once, directly in your browser, with no file ever leaving your device. The output is plain text: no fonts, colors, or layout, just the words, separated by a page break wherever one page ends and the next begins.
This only works for text-based PDFs — files where the words are stored as actual text data, which covers most PDFs generated from Word, Google Docs, LaTeX, web pages, or an e-signature tool. A scanned document or a photo saved as a PDF is different: it's just a picture of text, and a computer can't read pixels as words without OCR (optical character recognition) first turning them into a real text layer. If your file falls into that second category, run it through the OCR PDF tool before extracting.
Once extraction finishes, you can read the result two ways. "All text" shows everything in one continuous block, good for a quick copy-paste. "By page" breaks it into individual pages with a page switcher, which is useful for longer documents — combined with the built-in search, you can jump straight to whichever page mentions the term you're looking for, with every match highlighted on the page.
Common use cases
- Pulling a quote or clause out of a PDF without retyping it by hand
- Getting a plain-text version of a report to paste into another document or editor
- Feeding PDF content into a tool or workflow that only accepts plain text, not PDF
- Searching a long PDF for every page that mentions a specific name, term, or figure
- Preparing text from a PDF for translation, summarization, or analysis elsewhere
If you only need counts rather than the text itself — word count, character count, page count — the PDF Word Counter tool gives you that directly without showing the extracted text.
Related tools
PDF to Text — frequently asked questions
No. This tool reads the text layer that's already embedded in the PDF — it doesn't recognize text in an image. A scanned page or a photo saved as a PDF has no text layer at all, so the result will be empty. Run it through the OCR PDF tool first to create a text layer, then extract from that.
No — the output is plain text, with a page break between each page. Fonts, colors, tables, and layout aren't carried over, since the goal is the raw words, not a visual copy of the page.
Yes. Once extraction finishes, switch to "By page" view and type in the search box — pages containing a match are marked and the term is highlighted, with buttons to jump straight to the next or previous matching page.
Both. "Copy all text" puts the entire result on your clipboard, "Download .txt" saves it as a plain text file, and in page view you can also copy just the page you're looking at.
The tool can't read the text of an encrypted PDF without the password. If it detects one, it tells you directly and links to the Unlock PDF tool — remove the password there first, then come back and extract the text.
No fixed limit. Extraction runs entirely on your device, so a longer PDF just takes a little more time — the progress bar tracks it page by page.
No. The PDF is read and processed with JavaScript directly in your browser's memory. Nothing is sent to a server, so the tool also works offline once the page has loaded.