Extract text from a PDF online
Extract all the text from a PDF and copy it or download it as TXT, directly in your browser.
or click to select it
Extract all the text from a PDF directly in your browser. Copy it to the clipboard or download it as a TXT file, without needing to open the document in a PDF reader.
Reads the PDF's real text layer (the one a reader can select and search) and extracts it as plain text, page by page. If the PDF is a scanned document with no text layer (just page images), there will be no text to extract.
Use cases
- Quickly copy a paragraph or quote from a PDF without opening it in a reader.
- Extract a report's content to paste into another document or editor.
- Check whether a PDF has selectable text before processing it with another tool.
How it works
- 1
Upload your PDF
Drop the file in or select it from your device.
- 2
Click Extract text
Every page of the document is processed.
- 3
Copy or download
The result is shown on screen, ready to copy or save as TXT.
Technical details
Uses pdf.js (Mozilla's PDF engine) to read each page's textual content exactly as it's encoded in the file, with no OCR involved — it can only extract text that already exists as real text inside the PDF.
Frequently asked questions
Does it work with scanned PDFs?
Not if the scan has no text layer — this tool reads text already encoded in the PDF, it doesn't recognize text inside images (that would require OCR).
Is the original layout (columns, tables) preserved?
Not exactly — the result is plain text in the order the PDF encodes it, which may not match the visual layout in documents with columns or complex tables.