Reuse content
Recovering the text of an old report to update it saves retyping the whole thing.
PDF to text
Extract the text contained in a PDF.
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What it is for
Extracting the text from a PDF gives you its content as plain text, ready to copy, search, translate or reuse. It saves the manual work of selecting page by page, which in long documents is slow and tends to drag in odd line breaks.
It helps to understand the two kinds of PDF that exist. Those generated from a word processor carry the text inside as text, and it can be extracted perfectly. Those produced by a scanner are really photographs of paper: reading them would require optical character recognition, which this tool does not include.
The quick way to tell which one you have is to open the PDF and try selecting a word with the mouse. If you can, extraction will work. If the cursor only draws a rectangle, it is a scan.
How it works
- Upload the PDF you want to copy text from.
- Click "Process": the tool goes through every page and pulls out its text.
- Copy the result straight from the text box that appears.
When to use it
Translate a document
Machine translators handle plain text far better than a laid-out PDF.
Search and analyse
Having the text loose lets you search terms, count mentions or move it into a spreadsheet.
Practical tips
- The output is plain text: bold, columns and tables are lost. Reading order is preserved, layout is not.
- In two-column documents the order can come out mixed, because it depends on how the PDF was generated.
- If the PDF is protected against copying, extraction will probably return nothing.
- You will get no text from a scan. That needs OCR, which is not available here.
Frequently asked questions
Does it work with scanned PDFs (images)?
No. This tool extracts real embedded text; if the document is a scanned image with no text layer, you'd need OCR, which isn't available here.
Does it keep the original document formatting?
No, the result is plain text without bold, tables or columns; it keeps the reading order but not the visual layout.