PDF to Text

or drop files here

This extractor reads text objects through the PDF rendering library. It is useful for copying passages from a digital document that already contains selectable text.

How it works

This extractor reads text objects through the PDF rendering library. It is useful for copying passages from a digital document that already contains selectable text.

Choose the right inputs

A page heading separates the text extracted from each source page. Reported line endings are preserved where the PDF exposes them.

Understand the output

Reading order follows the source text objects and may differ from visual order in multi-column layouts. Review tables and newspaper-like pages before reusing the extracted text.

Use the result carefully

A scanned picture of letters has no text objects to extract. Such pages need an OCR workflow; an empty page section here is not evidence that the scan itself is blank.

PDF to Text FAQs

Scanned images need OCR, which this tool does not perform. Multi-column reading order depends on the source PDF.
A page with selectable Hello produces a UTF-8 text file containing Hello under its page marker; an image-only scan does not become searchable text.
A page heading separates the text extracted from each source page. Reported line endings are preserved where the PDF exposes them. A page with selectable Hello produces a UTF-8 text file containing Hello under its page marker; an image-only scan does not become searchable text.