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PDF Text Extractor

Pull the text out of a PDF so you can paste it somewhere useful. Line breaks are reconstructed from the layout, so the result reads as prose rather than as a jumble of fragments.

PDF Text Extractor tool

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How to use the PDF Text Extractor

  1. Add a PDF

    Drop one PDF onto the upload area.

  2. Extract the text

    Press Extract Text. Each page is read in turn and the progress bar shows how far along it is.

  3. Copy or download

    Read the result on the page, copy it to your clipboard, or download it as a .txt file with optional page markers.

Where your files are processed

Your files are processed locally in your browser and are not uploaded to our servers.

The PDF Text Extractor runs as JavaScript on the page you are reading. When you choose a file, the browser hands it to that code directly — it is never put into a network request, so there is no upload to cancel, no copy sitting in a queue somewhere, and nothing for us to delete afterwards. We could not see your file if we wanted to.

You can verify this rather than take our word for it: open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and run the tool. You will see no request carrying your file. Better still, once the page has loaded you can disconnect from the internet entirely and the PDF Text Extractor will keep working — which it could not do if it depended on a server.

To be exact about what doesleave the page: like the rest of this site, it loads analytics, which record that a tool was opened and whether it succeeded. Those events carry the tool’s name and a duration — never a file, a file name, or anything read out of your file. The tool panel above is also excluded from session recording, so nothing shown inside it is captured either.

Frequently asked questions

Because it is almost certainly a scan. A scanned page is an image, and an image of a word contains no letters as far as a computer is concerned. Extracting text from a scan requires optical character recognition, which this tool does not perform.

Open it in any PDF reader and try to select a line of text with your cursor. If you can highlight individual words, there is a text layer and this tool will find it. If your selection draws a box over the whole page instead, it is an image.

A PDF stores positioned fragments of text, not paragraphs. Line and paragraph breaks are inferred from where each fragment sits on the page, which works well for ordinary documents but can misread multi-column layouts, tables and text wrapped around images.

No. The output is plain text: no bold, no italics, no font sizes, no tables. It is meant for getting the words out, not for reproducing the document.

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Credits

The file-processing behind this tool is adapted from DoxDock by Mithun Srinivas, used under the MIT Licence. Rebuilt here in TypeScript for this site.

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