How to extract text from a PDF
- Drop your PDF into the box or choose it. You can add several at once.
- The text appears straight away. Pick Join into paragraphs to undo the PDF’s line breaks inside paragraphs, and tick or untick Mark where each page starts for page markers. Scanned pages are read with OCR in the language you choose.
- Copy the text, or download it as a TXT file. With several PDFs you can download them all together.
Where PDF text comes from
A PDF made from a document stores its text as characters with positions on the page. This tool reads those characters and puts them back into lines and paragraphs, using the position of each piece of text. That’s why it’s fast and exact for most PDFs, and why it can’t do anything with a scan, which has no characters to read.
Some PDFs store text in an unusual way. Old files and some design tools save each letter separately or use custom fonts without a proper character map. Those can come out with odd spacing or symbols instead of letters. If that happens, copying from the PDF in a viewer usually gives the same result, because it’s a problem with the file.
What to do with the text
- Fix broken lines. PDF text has a line break at the end of every printed line. Remove line breaks joins them back into paragraphs.
- Count words in a report or essay with the word counter.
- Search and quote. Plain text is easy to search, paste into notes or translate.