How to use
- Drop a PDF onto the box or click to choose one. Extraction starts right away and covers every page.
- If the PDF is password-protected, enter its open password and extraction continues.
- Toggle Add page separators and Join lines within paragraphs as needed — the result updates instantly.
- Press Copy to copy everything, or Download TXT to save a text file.
Which PDFs have extractable text?
Text lives in a PDF in one of two ways. A PDF saved from Word, Google Docs or PowerPoint has a text layer, so the words come straight out. A scanned or photographed PDF stores each page as a picture, so there is no text to extract.
| Kind of PDF | Result |
|---|---|
| Saved or printed from a document app | Text is extracted as-is |
| Made by a scanner or phone scanning app | No text — needs OCR (optical character recognition) |
| Scanned and then OCR’d | The OCR text is extracted, as accurate as the OCR was |
| Copying disabled by the author | Not extracted, out of respect for that setting |
If fewer than 10 characters per page come out on average, the tool flags the file as a likely scan. It does not perform OCR itself.
What the options do
PDFs end every visual line with a line break, so pasted text breaks mid-sentence.
| Option | Result |
|---|---|
| Default | The term of this agreement runs from January 1⏎through December 31, 2026. |
| Join lines within paragraphs | The term of this agreement runs from January 1 through December 31, 2026. |
| Add page separators | A --- Page 3 of 12 --- line before each page |
Paragraph breaks (blank lines) are kept when joining. Words split with a hyphen at a line end, like exam-⏎ple, are rejoined as example.
Things to know
- Extraction happens in your browser and the file is never uploaded.
- Text comes out in the order it was written into the PDF. Two-column layouts and tables may come out in a different order than you’d read them.
- If a font in the PDF lacks Unicode information, characters can come out garbled. Re-exporting the PDF from the original document usually fixes it.
- PDFs whose author disabled copying are not extracted. If you know the permissions password, remove the restriction with Unlock PDF first.
FAQ
How many characters did I get?
Character counts with and without spaces appear above the text. For words, lines and bytes, paste the text into the Character Counter.
I want to keep the page layout, not just the words
Save the pages as images with PDF to JPG instead.