Extract text from a PDF online
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Your file never leaves your browser
Pull the text content out of a PDF to copy into another document or search through easily. Upload your file and this tool reads the text layer of every page using pdf.js, entirely in your browser. This only works on PDFs that have real text (not scanned images) — for scanned documents, you'd need OCR instead.
Text PDFs versus scanned PDFs
This is the distinction that determines whether the tool works at all. A PDF created digitally — exported from Word, generated by a system, saved from a browser — stores real text characters, which can be read out directly. A scanned PDF stores photographs of paper: what you see as text is an image of text, with no character data behind it. Extraction returns nothing from a scan not because the tool failed but because there is genuinely no text in the file to extract.
What you get and what you lose
Extraction returns the words in reading order, page by page. It does not reconstruct layout — tables collapse into sequences of cell contents, multi-column pages may interleave, and formatting like bold and headings is not preserved. That makes it excellent for searching, quoting, and copying content into another document, and poor for recreating a document's appearance. If you need the layout, converting pages to images is the better route.
If your file is a scan
Getting text out of a scanned document requires OCR, which recognises character shapes in an image and reconstructs text from them. That is a fundamentally heavier process than reading existing text data and is not something this browser-based tool does. The quick way to tell which kind of PDF you have: open it in any reader and try to select a line of text with your cursor. If you can highlight individual words, extraction will work here. If the whole page selects as one block or nothing selects at all, you need OCR.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does it say there's no extractable text?
- Scanned or image-only PDFs don't have a text layer at all — the "text" you see is really a picture of text. Extracting from those requires OCR, which is a different process this client-side tool doesn't do.
- Does this preserve formatting like tables?
- No, this extracts plain text per page — layout, tables, and columns aren't reconstructed, just the raw text content in reading order.
- Are my files uploaded to a server?
- No, extraction happens locally in your browser using pdf.js. Nothing is sent anywhere.
- Why is the spacing odd in places?
- PDFs store text as positioned fragments rather than sentences, so word and line breaks are inferred. Unusual layouts sometimes produce imperfect spacing.
- Can I extract from a password-protected PDF?
- No — the content is encrypted and cannot be read without unlocking the file first.