Copying text out of a PDF shouldn't be this hard
Try to copy a few paragraphs out of a PDF and you know the drill: weird line breaks in the middle of sentences, columns jumbled together, or a reader that won't let you select anything. PDF to Text grabs all the text from every page and hands it to you as plain text you can paste into an email, a Word doc, a Google Doc or a notes app.
What you get
- All the text, page by page. Each page is marked so you can find your place.
- Copy to clipboard in one click.
- Download as .txt, a plain text file that opens in anything.
Plain text means just the words. Bold, fonts, colors, images and tables don't come along. That's usually the point: clean words you can reformat however you like.
The big catch: scanned PDFs
This tool reads the text layer of a PDF, the actual characters that were typed when the file was made. PDFs exported from Word, Google Docs, websites and most software have one.
Scanned documents usually don't. A scan is just a picture of a page, and to a computer, a picture of the word "invoice" is no different from a picture of a cat. If your PDF is a scan, you'll get little or no text back. Pulling text out of pictures takes OCR (optical character recognition), which this tool doesn't do.
Quick test: open your PDF and try to highlight a word. If you can, it has real text and this tool will work. If you just get a blue box around the whole page, it's a scan.
Got a scan? Phones have pretty good built-in OCR now. On an iPhone, open the image in Photos and press on the text (Live Text). Google Lens does the same on Android. Turn the page into an image with PDF to JPG first.
Layout quirks to expect
- Columns. Newsletters and research papers with two columns may come out with the columns read in a slightly odd order. Usually fine, sometimes a little scrambled.
- Tables come out as rows of words with spaces, not neat columns.
- Headers and footers, like page numbers and running titles, show up on every page. Delete them after pasting if they bug you.
- Hyphenated words split across lines stay split. A quick find-and-replace fixes it.
Handy uses
- Quoting a contract clause in an email
- Pasting a recipe into your notes app
- Getting a resume's text into an online application form
- Feeding text into a translator or word counter
- Searching a document when your reader's search is acting up
Only need a few pages' worth? Extract those pages first, then convert just that.
Why not just copy and paste?
You can, for a sentence or two. But copying from a PDF reader usually grabs text one page at a time, often skips headers or grabs them in the wrong place, and some PDFs block copying altogether in certain readers. Extracting gets the whole document in one go, clearly split by page, ready to paste wherever you need it.
Private, nothing uploaded
The text is read right in your browser. Your PDF is never sent to our server, and the text you copy stays on your device.