Updated
Drop a PDF here and press Extract text. Back comes a .txt file with the words of every page. It usually takes a second or two, and long documents are no exception. Our servers read the text layer directly, which spares you copying by hand, a slow job that tends to wreck line breaks.
How to pull the text from a PDF
- Add one PDF, several, or a folder to the drop zone.
- Leave Keep page layout on for tables, or switch it off for flowing text.
- Press Extract text.
- Save each .txt file, or all of them in one ZIP.
Does your PDF have a text layer?
If you can highlight a line in your PDF viewer, it does, and this tool can pull the text out. Nearly every file exported from a word processor, a bookkeeping program or a web browser passes this test.
Scans are the exception. A scanned page is a photograph of writing with nothing underneath it. There is no text to hand over, and the tool reports that. Send those files to OCR, which recognizes the letters in the image.
What the .txt file looks like
The result is a single UTF-8 file with the pages in order. Characters with accents, and alphabets beyond Latin, survive as long as the PDF encodes them properly.
Reading order follows what the extractor finds on each page. A page with one column of text comes out tidy. Multi-column pages, footnotes and headers may get mixed into the main text, and a table becomes lines of words with spaces between them.
Keep page layout is switched on by default. It holds the horizontal arrangement of the page in place, which is useful for tables. Switch it off when you want plain running text that pastes more cleanly into another document. Bold, font sizes and pictures are dropped either way. When you need that formatting, PDF to Word rebuilds an editable document instead.
Extracting text from a batch of PDFs
Drop a folder and download every .txt file in one ZIP. Without an account, a batch holds up to 5 PDFs of up to 50 MB each, and you get 20 server jobs per day. A free account raises that to batches of 10 and 50 jobs a day.
A searchable archive built from hundreds of PDFs is a job for Pro: batches of up to 500 files, 500 MB per file and no daily allowance. Credits handle a single big run without a subscription. One credit covers 25 files, and credits never expire.
Where the text is extracted
On our servers, not in your browser. Your PDF reaches us over an encrypted connection, and we pull the text out in Germany. Both the PDF and the .txt file are erased automatically within two hours.
FAQ
What if the tool reports no text layer?
It means the PDF is made of pictures: it was scanned, or saved as images. OCR can read those pictures.
Why are some words glued together or split apart?
Some PDFs place each word, or even each letter, on its own with no spaces stored between them. The extractor works out the spacing from where things sit on the page, and it can get that wrong now and then.
What about PDFs that need a password?
They work once the password is gone. Remove it with Unlock PDF first, then extract.