Get all the text out of a PDF, ready to copy
When you need the words out of a report or a set of notes, this tool extracts the text from every page. It works on PDFs that contain real text. If your PDF is only scanned images there is no text to find — use the OCR tool for those.
Open your PDF and try to select a sentence with the mouse. If the text highlights, the PDF contains real text and this page will pull it out perfectly — every character exactly as it was written, instantly, with no mistakes.
If nothing highlights, your PDF is a scan: a series of photographs of pages. There is no text inside it to extract, so this page will come back empty. That is not a fault, it is what the file is. For a scan you need recognition instead — use Image to Text, or PDF to JPG first and then run the images through it.
You get the words, in reading order, without the formatting. Bold, colours, font sizes, images and page borders do not survive — a plain text file has no way to hold them.
Multi-column layouts and tables are where extraction gets untidy, because the words are stored in the order they were drawn rather than the order you read them. A two-column research paper often comes out interleaved. For tables specifically, PDF to Excel tries to keep the rows and columns; for a document you want to keep editing, PDF to Word keeps more of the layout.
Your PDF is probably a scan, where the pages are images. Use Image to Text (OCR) instead.
No, you get plain text — tables and layout are dropped.
There is no limit; large documents just take longer.
No. The text is pulled out by your own browser and never leaves your device.
Your PDF is almost certainly a scan — pictures of pages with no text layer. Use Image to Text instead.
Yes. Type a page range such as 3-7 and only those pages are read.
No. Plain text has no formatting. Use PDF to Word if you need the layout.
Only if you can already open the file without being asked for a password. Locked files cannot be read.
No, but a very long document takes a moment, since your own device does the work.
🔒 Everything on this page happens inside your browser. Your file is never uploaded to a server.