About PDF to Text
PDF to Text pulls the words out of a PDF and shows them in a plain text box. Copy them to the clipboard or download them as a .txt file you can open anywhere.
Copying text straight from a PDF reader often gives you broken lines, missing spaces and words glued together. This tool reads the position of every piece of text on the page, rebuilds the lines in reading order, and can join them into proper paragraphs.
Use it to quote a report, feed a document into a translation tool or an AI assistant, search across a long contract, or rescue the text from a PDF you can't edit.
How to use PDF to Text
- Open the PDF.
- Leave Join lines into paragraphs on for flowing text, or turn it off to keep the original line breaks.
- Turn on Add page markers if you need to know which page each passage came from.
- Click Extract text.
- Copy the result or download it as .txt.
Reading order
The tool sorts text by position, so lines come out top to bottom and left to right.
Paragraph repair
Line breaks the PDF used for layout get removed, and hyphenated words get rejoined.
Page markers
Optional separators show where each page starts.
Word count
See the number of words and characters right away.
Why PDF text is hard to copy
A PDF doesn't store paragraphs. It stores instructions like "draw these five characters at this position". A sentence may come in several chunks, a line may get drawn after the line below it, and spaces between words often don't exist as characters at all. The reader just leaves a gap.
To rebuild readable text, the tool collects every chunk with its coordinates, groups chunks that share a baseline into lines, sorts lines from top to bottom, and inserts a space wherever the gap between two chunks is wider than a fraction of the font size. With paragraph joining on, it then merges consecutive lines of the same size unless the previous line ends a sentence and stops short.
Multi-column layouts can confuse that logic. If a page has two columns, lines from both columns may interleave. In that case, extract with paragraph joining off and fix the order by hand, or crop each column with Crop PDF first.
Scanned PDFs contain pictures of text, not text. The tool finds nothing to extract and tells you so. You need optical character recognition (OCR) software for those.
Tips for better results
- Turn on page markers when you extract text for citations.
- Use PDF to Word instead if you want headings and lists preserved in an editable file.
- If the output shows strange symbols, the PDF uses fonts without a proper character map. No extraction tool can recover those letters reliably.
- Compare two versions of a document's text with Compare PDF.
Questions and answers
Why is the result empty?
The PDF is most likely a scan made of images. It contains no text characters to extract.
Does it keep formatting such as bold or tables?
No. The output is plain text. For headings and paragraphs in an editable document, use PDF to Word.
Can it extract text from protected PDFs?
Remove the password first with Unlock PDF.
Does it work with non-Latin languages?
Yes. Text in Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic and other scripts extracts as long as the PDF stores it as real text.
Is my document sent anywhere?
No. The extraction runs in your browser.