Skip to content
DayUtils

PDF to Text – Extract All the Text from a PDF

Get the text out of a PDF in one step. Every page is read in order and shown in a box you can copy from, with optional page markers, and you can download it all as a plain .txt file. Password-protected PDFs work too, as long as you know the password.

Your files stay on your device

Loading tool…

How to extract text from a PDF

  1. Choose your PDF. If it’s password-protected, enter the password when asked.
  2. Press Extract text. Progress is shown page by page.
  3. Tick or untick Show page markers to include “--- Page 1 ---” separators.
  4. Copy the text or Download .txt.

What you can do with the text

  • Quote or reuse passages from reports, articles and e-books you have the right to use.
  • Search and edit in a word processor or note-taking app.
  • Count words with the word counter.
  • Listen to a document with text to speech.
  • Compare versions of a contract with text compare.
  • Translate by pasting into a translation service.
  • Feed data into spreadsheets or scripts.

Text PDFs vs scanned PDFs

A PDF made from a word processor, a website or an e-book contains the actual characters, so they can be extracted exactly. A PDF made by a scanner or a phone camera contains only pictures of the pages; there’s no text inside until OCR is used to recognise the letters.

A quick test: open the PDF and try to select a word. If you can highlight individual words, it contains text. If you can only select the whole page as one block, it’s a scan.

Tidying the extracted text

PDF line breaks follow the page layout, so a paragraph may arrive as several short lines. To fix that:

  • Use remove extra spaces with “Join all lines into one paragraph” for flowing text.
  • Use find and replace to remove headers, footers or page numbers that repeat on every page.
  • Turn off page markers if you want one continuous text.

Languages and special characters

Text in any language is extracted, including Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Chinese and other scripts, as long as the PDF stores it properly. Some older PDFs use fonts without a proper character map, which can produce unreadable symbols; in that case, OCR on page images gives better results.

Large documents

Long PDFs — hundreds of pages — are processed page by page so your browser stays responsive. On a phone, very large books can take a minute. If you only need part of a document, split it first with split PDF to save time.

Privacy

The PDF is read with the same PDF engine your browser uses to display PDFs, entirely on your device. Nothing is uploaded or stored.

To save the pictures from a PDF instead, use extract images from PDF; to turn pages into images, PDF to JPG or PDF to PNG.

Frequently asked questions

How do I copy all the text from a PDF?

Choose the PDF and press “Extract text”. The text from every page appears in the box. Press Copy to copy it all, or download it as a .txt file.

Why is no text found?

The PDF is probably a scan — pictures of pages rather than real text. Scans need OCR (optical character recognition). Convert the pages to images with PDF to PNG, then use an image-to-text OCR tool.

Why are lines in the wrong order or words joined?

PDFs store text as positioned fragments, not paragraphs. Multi-column layouts, tables and headers can come out in an unexpected order. The tool starts a new line whenever the text moves down the page, which works well for most documents.

Does it keep formatting such as bold or tables?

No. The output is plain text. Table cells come out as text in reading order, often separated by spaces.

Can it read protected PDFs?

Yes, if you enter the password. The password is used only on your device to open the file.

Is my PDF uploaded?

No. The text is extracted by your browser’s PDF engine, so confidential documents stay private.

Related tools

Last updated: