When would you extract text from a PDF?
- Copying content from a locked PDF (where Ctrl+A is disabled)
- Importing text into a spreadsheet or database
- Feeding document content to an AI or search index
- Checking whether a PDF actually contains text (or is just a scan)
How to extract text from a PDF free
- Open the Extract Text tool.
- Drop your PDF onto the upload zone.
- Click Extract Text.
- The text from every page appears in a preview box.
- Click Copy to clipboard to paste elsewhere, or Download .txt to save as a text file.
Scanned PDFs: what happens?
A scanned PDF is a PDF where each page is just an image (a photo of a page). There is no text layer for pdf.js to extract, the tool will tell you clearly:
"No text found. This looks like a scanned PDF."
For scanned PDFs, you need OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to recognise the text in the image. OCR support is coming in Phase 2 of this site.
Is the formatting preserved?
Basic line breaks and spacing are preserved. Complex multi-column layouts (newspapers, magazines) may not reproduce columns correctly in plain text, the content will all be there, but in reading order, not visual layout order. This is a fundamental limitation of text extraction from PDFs.
Tabs, tables, and special characters
PDF does not store tables as tables, it stores individual characters at specific positions. Text extraction reconstructs a reasonable reading order, but tables usually come out as plain rows without alignment. For structured data extraction, dedicated tools (like Camelot or Tabula) are better suited, but those require Python, not a browser.
Privacy
This tool uses pdf.js, the same engine that powers Firefox's PDF viewer, running locally in your browser. No text is sent to any server.