PDF to Text

PDF to Text pulls the readable text out of your document, page by page, so you can copy it into an email, a Word file or a notes app. It works with any PDF that contains real text.

What does PDF to Text do?

PDF to Text extracts the words inside a PDF document and shows them as plain text that you can copy anywhere. Instead of selecting text page by page in a PDF reader, which often grabs the wrong lines or misses parts, you get the complete text of the document in one box with one copy button. The result works in emails, notes apps, word processors, spreadsheets, translation tools and AI assistants.

Why extract text from a PDF?

• Edit content. Reuse paragraphs from a report, brochure or old document without retyping them.
• Quote and research. Students and researchers can copy passages from articles and papers to quote or summarise them.
• Translate. Paste the text into a translation service, which usually works better with plain text than with a PDF file.
• Search and analyse. Plain text is easy to search, count and compare. Paste it into our Word Counter to see the length of a document.
• Accessibility. Screen readers and text-to-speech apps handle plain text more reliably than complex PDF layouts.

How to use it

Select your PDF and choose whether you want page break markers. With markers turned on, each page starts with a line such as “— Page 3 —“, which helps you find where a passage came from. Click the extract button and the text appears in a box below. Use “Copy result” to copy everything to your clipboard, then paste it wherever you need it.

What kind of PDFs work?

PDFs created from Word, Google Docs, websites, accounting software and most other programs contain real text, and they work very well. You can usually tell because you can select words with your mouse in a normal PDF reader.

Scanned documents are different. A scan is a photograph of paper, so the PDF contains a picture of letters rather than actual letters. This tool cannot read text inside pictures. If you get an empty result, your file is probably a scan, and you need OCR (optical character recognition) software to convert the picture into text.

About formatting

Plain text has no fonts, colours, columns or tables. The tool keeps line breaks where the lines in the PDF end, so paragraphs and lists stay readable. Multi-column layouts, such as newspapers and academic papers, may be read across columns in some places, and tables become lines of words separated by spaces. Headers, footers and page numbers are included because they are part of the page text. A quick tidy-up after pasting usually fixes these small issues.

Your document stays private

Text extraction runs inside your browser using an open-source PDF reader. The document and the extracted text are never sent to our servers, so you can safely use the tool with contracts, financial statements, medical letters and other confidential material.

Tips

• Turn off page markers if you want one continuous text to paste into another document.
• If the text comes out in a strange order, try copying smaller sections directly from your PDF reader.
• To share only some pages, use Extract PDF Pages first and then extract the text.

Extracting text from protected PDFs

Some PDFs are set to block copying in PDF readers. If the file opens without a password, the text is usually still readable by this tool. Respect the rights of the author: use extracted text for personal reading, quoting with credit, or accessibility, and ask for permission before republishing someone else’s work.

How to use PDF to Text

1. Select your PDF file.
2. Choose whether to mark the page breaks.
3. Click "Extract text" and copy the result.

Frequently asked questions

Why do I get no text?

Scanned PDFs contain pictures of text, not real text. Those need OCR software.

Is the formatting kept?

Line breaks are kept where possible, but fonts, columns and tables are turned into plain text.

Can I save the text as a file?

Copy the text and paste it into Notepad, TextEdit, Word or Google Docs, then save it in the format you need.

Does it work with languages other than English?

Yes. Any text stored in the PDF is extracted, including Urdu, Arabic, Hindi and other scripts, as long as the PDF contains real text.

Is there a page limit?

No fixed limit. Very long documents take a few seconds longer and need more memory on your device.

Is this tool really free?

Yes. All tools on this website are free to use, with no sign-up needed.

Are my files and data safe?

Yes. Everything is processed inside your own browser. Your files and text are not uploaded to our servers.

Does it work on mobile?

Yes. The tools work on modern phones, tablets and computers.