Extract Text from a PDF
Pull all the text out of a PDF, preview it, copy it, or download it as a .txt file. Nothing is uploaded, it all happens on your device.
Click to choose a PDF file, or drag and drop it here
Stays on your device, nothing is uploaded.
Are my PDF files uploaded anywhere?
No. Text is extracted entirely inside your browser using JavaScript. Your files never leave your device or touch a server.
Will this work on a scanned PDF?
No, not on its own. This reads text that's already embedded in the PDF, a scanned page is just an image, so there's no text to extract unless it was already run through OCR.
Does formatting like columns or tables come through cleanly?
Mostly, but complex layouts (multi-column pages, tables) can come out in an unexpected reading order, since PDFs don't store text in a strict top-to-bottom structure.
Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
Not currently. Password-protected or encrypted PDFs can't be read by the tool and will show an error, remove the password first with a PDF reader.
How it works
A PDF doesn't store paragraphs, sentences, or even words. It stores positioned runs of
glyphs: "put these character shapes at these coordinates in this font." This tool uses
pdf.js, the PDF engine from Firefox, to walk each page's content stream and collect
every one of those text-showing operations via getTextContent(). The
fragments are then joined with spaces and the whitespace collapsed, page by page, into
the plain text you see. The optional page markers simply record where each page's
fragments started.
That storage model explains the two ways extraction can surprise you. First, reading order: pdf.js returns fragments roughly in the order they appear in the file, which for multi-column layouts, tables, or designed documents isn't always the order a human reads them in. Second, and more fundamental: a scanned PDF contains no text at all. A scanner produces a photograph of a page, so unless someone ran OCR on it, there are no glyph runs to extract, and this tool will correctly report that it found nothing. It doesn't guess or hallucinate characters from pixels; if you need text out of a scan, you need OCR software, which is a genuinely different technology.
A quick self-test: if you can select and copy text in your PDF reader, extraction will work here. If your cursor just draws a selection box over the page, it's a scan.
Extraction happens the moment you drop the file, entirely in a local worker thread. Open DevTools and watch the Network tab: whether it's a contract or a medical report, no request carries your document or its text anywhere. Copy and download both operate on the text already sitting in your browser's memory.
From the blog: Why PDF Compression Works Great on Scans and Barely on Reports