How to use the PDF to Text
- Drop your PDF onto the box or click to choose it. Locked files ask for their password.
- Wait a moment while the text of every page is read and rebuilt into lines and paragraphs.
- Tick Join lines into paragraphs for text you will paste into a document, or Show page separators to see where each page starts.
- Click Copy text or Download .txt.
Features
- Rebuilds lines, word spacing and paragraphs from the page layout
- Optional paragraph joining that also repairs words split by hyphens
- Optional “Page N” separators between pages
- Word and character counts, plus a warning for scanned pages
- Handles right-to-left scripts and rotated pages
- Runs locally; password-protected PDFs open with their password
Why copying from a PDF goes wrong
A PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores instructions such as “draw these characters at this position in this font.” Line breaks, spaces between words and even the order of the text are only implied by where things sit on the page. That is why pasting from a PDF often produces broken lines in the middle of sentences, words glued together, or columns mixed up. A good extractor has to read the positions and reconstruct the structure.
How this tool rebuilds the text
- Read the text pieces. PDF.js, Mozilla’s open-source PDF engine, lists every run of text on the page with its position, size and direction.
- Form lines. Pieces that share a baseline become one line, ordered left to right (or right to left for scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew). A gap wider than about a fifth of the font size becomes a space; a very wide gap, typical of table columns, becomes a tab.
- Form paragraphs. The tool measures the usual distance between lines on each page. A noticeably bigger gap, a jump to a new column, or a change in font size (such as a heading) starts a new paragraph, shown as a blank line.
- Optionally reflow. With Join lines into paragraphs switched on, the lines inside each paragraph are joined into one, and words hyphenated across a line break, such as “docu- ment”, are rejoined. Bulleted and numbered items stay on their own lines.
Which option to use
| You want to… | Settings |
|---|---|
| Paste into Word or Google Docs | Join lines on |
| Keep the look of addresses, poems or code | Join lines off |
| Quote page numbers or check what is on each page | Page separators on |
| Copy a table into a spreadsheet | Join lines off (tabs become cells) |
Scanned PDFs need OCR
If a PDF was made by a scanner or a phone camera, each page is a picture and there is no text to extract, however clear the words look. The tool detects this and tells you which pages have no text layer. To read those pages, turn them into images with PDF to JPG and run them through Image to Text, which uses optical character recognition. Some scanners add an invisible OCR layer themselves; in that case the text extracts normally here, with whatever accuracy the scanner achieved.
Limits worth knowing
- Complex layouts such as magazine pages with text wrapped around pictures may need a little tidying.
- Some PDFs use fonts without a proper character map, so text extracts as symbols or nonsense. That is a property of the file; copying in any reader gives the same result, and OCR is the workaround.
- Headers, footers and page numbers are part of the page text, so they appear in the output.
The text is extracted inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded, which makes it safe for contracts, medical letters and other private documents. To count words afterwards, paste the result into the Word Counter.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my PDF give no text at all?
It is most likely a scanned PDF, where every page is an image. Convert the pages with PDF to JPG and use Image to Text (OCR) to read the words.
Can I keep the paragraphs instead of broken lines?
Yes. Tick “Join lines into paragraphs” to merge the lines of each paragraph and rejoin words that were hyphenated at the end of a line.
Does it work with password-protected PDFs?
Yes, if you know the password. Enter it when asked; it is used only in your browser to open the file.
Is my document uploaded to a server?
No. Text extraction runs entirely in your browser, so the PDF and its contents never leave your device.
Can I extract text from only some pages?
Turn on page separators to see where each page starts, then copy the part you need. For a smaller file first, use Extract PDF Pages.