How to extract text from a PDF (and when you can't)

To extract text from a PDF, drop it into PDF to Text: it reads the PDF's text layer and gives you plain text to copy or download as a .txt file. This works for PDFs created from a document or a web page — not for scans, which contain pictures of text rather than text.

The quick way

1. Open PDF to Text and drop your PDF.
2. Tick Add page separators if you want to know which page each passage comes from.
3. Click Extract text.
4. Copy the result or download it as a .txt file.

The PDF is read in your browser and is not uploaded anywhere.

Text PDF or scanned PDF?

Not all PDFs contain text, even when they look like they do.

• Text PDFs are exported from Word, Google Docs, a website, an invoicing program… The letters are stored as characters, so they can be extracted.
• Scanned PDFs are photos of paper pages wrapped in a PDF. What you see as letters is just pixels. There is no text to extract.

How to check in five seconds: open the PDF in any reader (your browser works) and try to select a sentence with the mouse. If individual words highlight, there is a text layer. If you can only draw a rectangle over the whole page, or nothing gets selected, it's a scan.

Some files mix both — a typed contract with a scanned signature page, for example. Only the text pages will give results.

What if it's a scan?

PDF to Text does not do OCR (optical character recognition), so a scanned PDF will return little or no text, and the tool tells you when no text layer is found. Your options:

• Ask for the original. The sender often has the Word or text version the scan was printed from.
• Use an OCR tool. Many desktop PDF readers, scanner apps and office suites include text recognition. Check the result carefully: OCR makes mistakes, especially on small print, tables and handwriting.

Clean up the extracted text

Text pulled from a PDF keeps the PDF's layout habits: a line break at the end of every line, words cut with a hyphen, double spaces, stray page headers.

1. Paste the text into Text Cleaner to fix broken lines, extra spaces and similar leftovers.
2. Remove repeated headers or footers by hand if needed — they appear once per page.
3. Check the length with Word Counter if you're working to a limit.

For a step-by-step on that clean-up, see how to clean text copied from a PDF.

Common problems

Columns come out mixed up. A PDF stores text in positioned blocks, not in reading order. Two-column layouts, sidebars and text boxes can be extracted in an unexpected order. Page separators help you find your way; sometimes copying column by column from a reader is faster.

Tables lose their structure. Cells come out as lines of text. The content is there, but you'll need to rebuild the table.

Strange characters or missing letters. Some PDFs use fonts with unusual encodings, and the extracted characters don't match what's on screen. There isn't much any extractor can do about that; the original document is the reliable fix.

Only part of the text appears. The PDF may mix real text with images of text (a scanned annex, a screenshot, a logo). Only the real text is extracted.

Limits worth knowing

• No OCR: scanned pages give little or no text.
• Formatting (bold, fonts, images, layout) is not kept — the output is plain text on purpose.
• A password-protected PDF must be unlocked before its text can be read.

If you need the text for a document of your own, extraction plus a quick clean-up is usually the fastest route. If you need the exact layout, keep the PDF.