How to Copy Text From a PDF (Page by Page)

Copying text from a PDF with your mouse often breaks lines in strange places, skips columns or copies nothing at all. Extracting the text directly gives you clean, editable content you can reuse anywhere.

How to extract text from a PDF

1. Open PDF to Text.
2. Select your PDF.
3. Read the text page by page, then copy it or download it.

Try it now: PDF to Text is free, works in your browser and needs no signup.

Good uses

• Quoting a paragraph from a report in an email.
• Moving a document into Word or Google Docs to edit it.
• Getting text into a translation tool.
• Searching or counting words in a long document (try our Word Counter).

Why some PDFs give no text

The tool works with PDFs that contain real text, such as files exported from Word or a website. A scanned document or a phone photo saved as PDF is just a picture of text, so there is no text layer to extract. Those files need OCR (optical character recognition) software instead.

A quick test: open the PDF and try to select a single word. If you can highlight it, the text can be extracted.

Tidy up the result

• Remove repeated headers, footers and page numbers.
• Rejoin lines that were broken by the original layout.
• Check tables carefully, because columns can come out in reading order rather than as a grid.

Privacy

Text extraction happens in your browser. Your document is not uploaded.

Try it now: PDF to Text is free, works in your browser and needs no signup.