Free PDF tool
Extract text from a PDF
Get the words out of a PDF to search, quote or reuse them. Choose the pages, then copy the result or download it as a UTF-8 text file.
Your PDF stays on your device
- Free, no account needed
- Built on PDF.js
How it works
Extract text from a PDF in 4 steps
- 1
Add a PDF
Drop the document onto the tool or choose it from your device.
- 2
Choose pages
Keep all pages or enter a selection. Page markers show where each page starts.
- 3
Extract
Select Extract text. The text appears below the tool.
- 4
Copy or download
Copy it to the clipboard or save it as a .txt file.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. The tool runs entirely in your browser: the PDF is read, changed and saved on your device, and its contents are never sent to our servers.
Why is no text found in my PDF?
Scanned documents are pictures of text. Without optical character recognition there is nothing to extract, and the tool tells you so. PDFs saved from a word processor or created by our API contain real text.
Is the reading order correct?
Text comes out in the order it is stored in the PDF, which matches the visual order in most documents. Multi-column layouts and tables can come out column by column.
Is there a file size or page limit?
There is no fixed limit because processing happens on your device. Very large files (several hundred megabytes) depend on your browser's available memory; if a file fails to open, try closing other tabs or use the API for server-side processing.
The other direction
Generate documents from your data with Dynamic Document API
The API works the other way round: it creates PDFs and images from HTML, Markdown and templates filled with JSON, so text, pictures and data are yours before the file exists. Reading content back out of existing PDFs is what this free tool is for.