Extract text from a PDF for free

How it works

1. 1

   Upload the PDF.

2. 2

   Leave the page range empty for all pages, or enter the pages you want.

3. 3

   Extract the text.

4. 4

   Copy it or download it as a .txt file.

About the PDF to Text

Copying from a PDF viewer often scrambles columns, breaks words or misses whole pages. This tool reads the text layer of the PDF directly, rebuilds each line in reading order from top to bottom, and gives you plain text you can copy or save as a .txt file. Everything runs in your browser, so the document is never uploaded.

What you can do

• Extract every page, or enter a range such as 1-3, 7 to take only some pages.
• See each page's text under a "--- Page N ---" marker so you know where it came from.
• Copy all of the text to the clipboard with one click.
• Download it as a UTF-8 .txt file named after the PDF.
• Line breaks follow the visual lines of the page, so addresses and lists keep their shape.

When it works best

• Pasting the content of a report into an email, chat or AI assistant.
• Feeding document text into a script, search index or translation tool.
• Quoting passages from a long PDF without fighting the viewer's text selection.
• Counting the words in a PDF by pasting the text into a word counter.

Things to know

• Formatting such as bold, tables and images is dropped; tables come out as lines of text separated by spaces.
• If a page has little or no text, the tool warns that it looks scanned. Run it through PDF OCR first, then extract again.
• Use PDF to Word instead when you need the layout and styling kept.

Frequently asked questions