PDF Text Extractor

How to extract text from a PDF

1. Drop your PDF onto the upload area or click to browse, pdfjs-dist reads every page.
2. Review the extracted text in the output area. Pages are separated by blank lines.
3. Click Copy to put the text on your clipboard, or Download to save it as a .txt file.
4. Use the Change file link to extract text from another PDF.

Common uses

• Pulling quotes or passages out of a long report for citation. Use the word counter on the extracted text to check length.
• Turning a PDF into searchable plain text for note-taking or summary work, then run a find and replace to clean up artifacts.
• Sharing the readable content of a PDF without the file itself, useful when emailing only the text matters.
• Combining extracted text with a text diff to compare two revisions of the same document.

Technical specification

• Algorithm or formula: Per-page text retrieval via pdfjs-dist's page.getTextContent(), joining text items in reading order, keeping the line breaks pdf.js reports within each page, and separating pages with blank lines to preserve document structure.
• Browser API or library: pdfjs-dist (Mozilla's PDF.js) for parsing and text-layer extraction. Runs in a Web Worker for non-blocking processing of large files.
• Input limits: PDF up to 100 MB. No page-count cap beyond browser memory.
• Output: Plain UTF-8 text, displayed in the page and downloadable as a .txt file.
• Known limitations: Reads only the embedded text layer. Scanned PDFs without OCR yield little or no text. Complex multi-column layouts may produce out-of-order text in rare cases. Some Chinese, Japanese and Korean PDFs, typically ones whose fonts rely on a predefined character map (CMap), come out with that text missing, because those character maps are not bundled with the tool.

Frequently asked questions

Can this tool extract text from a scanned PDF?

Only from PDFs that already contain a text layer. The tool reads the embedded text using pdfjs-dist; scanned documents that only contain images of text return little or no content because there is nothing for the extractor to read. All extraction runs in your browser.

Is my PDF uploaded to a server?

All text extraction runs in your browser using pdfjs-dist. Our servers are not involved at any point.

Can I copy or download the extracted text?

Yes. Use the Copy button to put the entire text on your clipboard, or the Download button to save it as a .txt file.

Will the original layout and formatting be preserved?

Plain text only. Fonts, colors, and column layout are stripped. Line breaks within a page are kept, and page breaks become blank lines so the document structure stays visible.

Why is some text missing or in the wrong order?

Text comes out in the order the PDF draws it, which for multi-column layouts is not always the order you read it. Text inside images, such as a scanned page or a chart, is not extracted, and a password-protected PDF has to be unlocked first.