Extract Text from a PDF
Upload a PDF and pull out all its text content into a plain .txt file, organized page by page — useful for copying content out of a PDF you can't easily select text from otherwise.
Use the controls on each page thumbnail to rotate, reorder, or delete pages.
About the PDF Text Extraction Tool
This tool pulls all the text content out of a PDF and downloads it as a plain .txt file, organized page by page. It's the fastest way to get text out of a PDF that resists normal copy-paste, or to get a quick plain-text version of a document's content for searching or reference.
How it works
Upload a PDF; the tool reads the text actually embedded in each page (not an image of the text) and writes it out with a page-number header marking where each page's content begins, so the structure of the original document stays easy to follow in the output file.
An important limitation
This works only on PDFs that already contain real, embedded text. A scanned document that's just a photograph of a page saved as PDF has no embedded text to extract — that requires OCR (optical character recognition) first, which this tool does not perform.
Common uses
- Copying content out of a PDF report into a text editor or document for further editing
- Getting a searchable plain-text version of a PDF for quick reference
- Pulling text content for further processing, such as pasting into a translation tool
Need an image instead of text? See convert PDF to images.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this work on scanned PDFs?
No — it extracts text that's already embedded in the PDF. Scanned image-only PDFs need OCR first, which this tool doesn't do.
How is the text organized?
The output file marks each page with a “----- Page N -----” header so you can see where each page's content starts.