Free tool
Get the text out of a PDF.
Choose a PDF and read its text straight away — copy it, or save it as a .txt file. No signup, and the document never leaves this browser tab.
1 Choose the PDF
2 The text
Choose a PDF and its text appears here, page by page, ready to copy or download as a .txt file.
Your file stays on your device
The reading happens in this page, using your browser’s own processing. The document is not sent to a server, nothing is stored, and there is no account to create. Closing the tab is all the cleanup there is.
One thing does travel, and it is worth being exact about: a PDF written in Japanese, Chinese or Korean often stores its characters through a shared encoding table rather than spelling them out, and a document with no embedded font needs a standard one to be read at all. Those tables are downloaded from this site when a document needs them. They travel to your browser — your document never travels anywhere.
How to use it
- Drop in a PDF, or choose one from your device. Reading starts immediately — there is no button to press.
- The text appears page by page as it is read, so a long document shows its progress rather than a spinner.
- Copy the whole thing, or download it as a .txt file. On a document with more than one page you can add [Page 1] markers first, so you can still tell where each page began.
One PDF at a time, up to 50 MB. Choosing another file replaces the one on screen.
Nothing comes out? The PDF is probably a scan
A PDF can hold text in two completely different ways, and they look identical on screen. A document produced by software — an invoice from an accounting system, an exported report, a Word document saved as PDF — carries a text layer: the actual characters, which is what this tool reads. A document produced by a scanner or a phone camera carries a picture of each page. There are no characters in it at all, so there is nothing to pull out.
When that happens, this tool says so rather than showing you an empty box: it tells you how many pages had no text layer and which ones. Turning a picture of words back into words needs OCR, which this tool deliberately does not do — it would have to send your document to a server to run it, and that would break the one promise this page makes.
What you get, and what you do not
The text comes out in the order the PDF stores it, with the line breaks the document itself records. That is usually close to how the page reads, but a PDF has no idea what a paragraph, a heading or a table is — so columns, tables and multi-column layouts can come out interleaved. Formatting, images and the position of the text on the page are not preserved; this is the words, as plain text.
Pages that had no text layer are counted and named rather than skipped silently, and with page markers switched on they appear in the .txt file too, so the numbering never jumps without explanation.
Related tools
PDF Page Counter tells you how long a stack of documents is, Split PDF separates one by page range, and Merge PDF combines several into one. All of them are on the free tools page.
Need specific fields rather than the raw text?
Raw text is the right answer when you want to read or search a document. It is the wrong shape when what you actually need is a spreadsheet — the supplier, the invoice number, the date and the total from each of forty PDFs, one row per document. That is the part ExtractToExcel does: you name the columns you want, and each PDF comes back as a row in an Excel workbook. It reads scanned documents too, which this free tool cannot.
Extract PDFs to Excel