Extract the text from a PDF

How to Extract Text

1. Add your PDF. Drag the file onto the drop zone. The text is read out immediately and shown in a preview pane.
2. Check the output. Scroll the extracted text to confirm the reading order looks right, especially if the document has columns.
3. Pick a format. Plain text for maximum compatibility, or Markdown if you want headings and paragraph breaks preserved as structure.
4. Copy or download. Copy everything to the clipboard, or save it as a file.

Why copy-and-paste from a PDF goes wrong

Selecting text in a PDF reader and pasting it elsewhere usually produces a mess: line breaks in the middle of sentences, columns interleaved, headers and footers scattered through the body.

The reason is that a PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores instructions to draw specific characters at specific coordinates. There is no inherent notion of which characters belong to the same sentence, or which column comes first — that structure is something a reader has to infer from the geometry.

This tool does that inference deliberately rather than as a side effect of a selection rectangle. It groups characters into lines by vertical position, joins lines into paragraphs where the spacing suggests continuation, orders columns by their horizontal bands, and drops repeated headers and footers. The result is text you can actually use.

If nothing comes out, your PDF is a picture

Occasionally a PDF yields little or no text. Almost always this means it is a scan: the pages are photographs of paper, and there are no characters in the file to extract — only pixels that happen to look like letters.

The quick test is to try selecting text in any PDF reader. If your cursor will not highlight individual words, there is no text layer.

The fix is OCR, which recognises the shapes as characters and adds a real text layer. Run the file through the OCR tool first, then come back here. It is worth noting that OCR output is a best guess — expect to proofread, particularly with unusual fonts, poor scan quality or handwriting.

Extracting text from documents you cannot upload

Text extraction is a common first step before feeding a document into something else — a search index, a spreadsheet, a summarising tool, a script. That means the source is often a contract, a medical report, a legal filing or a set of meeting minutes.

Because extraction happens in your browser, the document is never transmitted. That keeps the option open to extract text from material you are contractually or legally prohibited from uploading to a third-party service, which is a surprisingly common constraint in professional work.

Frequently asked questions