PDF to text takes the text stored inside a PDF and lays it out page by page, so you can copy it into an email, a document or a notes app instead of retyping it. It suits anyone who receives reports, contracts, statements or study material as PDF and needs the words, not the layout.
The file is read in your browser. Every page gets its own block under a Page heading with its own Copy button, and under the text you see how many pages, words and characters the document has. Only text that is really stored in the file can be extracted. A scanned document is just a set of pictures, and the tool tells you when it finds nothing to read.
How to use
- Drop a PDF on the page or press Choose PDF. One file is handled at a time.
- If the file is locked, type the password in the Password field and press Unlock. A wrong password shows a message and you can try again, or pick Choose another file.
- Wait while the pages are read one after another. The status line says which page is being read, and a large file may take a little longer.
- Scroll through the text. Pages with nothing to extract say that there is no text on them, and the status line counts how many such pages there are.
- Press Copy on a page to take only that page, or Copy all for the whole document. Download .txt saves everything in one text file named after your PDF.
- To work on another document, use Open another PDF at the bottom of the panel.
When it helps
A common case is quoting a few paragraphs from a long report in an email without dragging the whole PDF along. Others are copying a clause out of a contract to compare it with a second version, lifting a reference list out of a thesis, or moving the lines of an e-statement into a spreadsheet to sort them. A student with lecture slides saved as PDF can turn them into a .txt file and search it in any editor.
The word and character counts help when a text has a limit, such as an abstract, a form field or a scholarship essay. Paste the text into the form only after you have checked the count here.
Tips
- If a page says it has no text, it is probably a picture, such as a scanned sheet or a photo placed in the document. A PDF that mixes typed and scanned pages gives you the typed ones and a count of the empty ones.
- Compare important figures with the original PDF after copying, especially numbers that came out of a table.
- If Copy fails, the tool says so. Select the text on the page and copy it yourself.
- A very large PDF takes longer because every page is read in turn. Leave the tab open until the status line shows the finished text.
- On devices that support sharing a file, a share button appears next to the other buttons so you can send the .txt on directly.