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Extract PDF Text

Pull all text content out of a PDF file

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Select a PDF file or drag it here

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About Extract PDF Text

Extract all readable text from a PDF document in seconds. This free online PDF text extractor uses Mozilla's pdf.js library (Apache 2.0) to parse every page of your PDF and return the text content as plain UTF-8. Download the result as a .txt file or copy it directly from the text area. Ideal for quickly pulling content out of reports, ebooks, legal documents, research papers, and contracts when you need to search, translate, or reuse the text.

Important note: this tool only works on PDFs that contain real, selectable text. If your PDF is a scan of a paper document (i.e. just an image of text), there is no text to extract — you would need an OCR tool for that. All processing happens locally in your browser; your documents are never uploaded to any server.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does it work on scanned PDFs? +

No. If the PDF is a scan (that is, the pages are really images of text), there is no selectable text to extract. You would need an OCR tool to recognize characters from the images first.

Is the extracted text well formatted? +

Text is returned in reading order with page separators. Complex multi-column layouts may produce slightly scrambled output — this is a common limitation of every PDF text extractor.

Does the tool keep my PDF private? +

Yes. The PDF is parsed locally in your browser with pdf.js. Nothing is uploaded to any server.

In what encoding is the text saved? +

The downloaded .txt file is UTF-8, which supports accented characters and non-Latin scripts like Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, and Chinese.

Can I extract only a specific page? +

The current version extracts the full document. You can copy just the page you need from the preview, or split the PDF first and run extraction on the single page.