PDF Text Extractor
Extract all text content from PDF files
How to use PDF Text Extractor
- Select a PDF file from your device.
- Text is extracted page by page, with progress shown.
- Copy the extracted text or download it as a .txt file.
- Each page is labeled so you can find content from specific pages.
Extracting text from PDFs
PDF files store text in a complex internal format that makes copying difficult — especially across multiple pages or from PDFs with unusual layouts. This tool reads the PDF structure and extracts all embedded text content.
This works for text-based PDFs (created from Word, LaTeX, web pages, etc.). If your PDF is a scanned document (essentially images of pages), there is no embedded text to extract. For scanned PDFs, you need OCR (optical character recognition).
The extraction runs entirely in your browser using Mozilla pdf.js. Your PDF is never uploaded anywhere.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can this extract text from scanned PDFs?
No. This tool extracts embedded text from text-based PDFs. Scanned documents (where pages are images) contain no extractable text. For scanned PDFs, use an OCR tool.
Is the formatting preserved?
Basic paragraph structure is preserved, but complex formatting like tables, columns, headers/footers, and styled text cannot be perfectly reconstructed from a PDF.
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. The entire extraction runs in your browser using pdf.js. Your PDF never leaves your device.
Is there a file size limit?
There is no hard limit, but very large PDFs (100MB+) may be slow to process in the browser. For best results, keep files under 50MB.