PDF to Text Converter - Extract Text from a PDF Online, Free and Private
PDF to Text Converter
Copy the text out of a PDF, page by page
Drag & drop a PDF here, or click to choose
Reading Order
Text pieces are grouped into lines by their position on the page and read left to right, top to bottom.
Paragraph Option
Join the lines of each paragraph into one line and repair words that were split with a hyphen at the end of a line.
Spots Scans
If a PDF has no text layer, the tool says so instead of returning an empty file, because a scan needs OCR.
Private
The PDF is read in your browser with pdf.js and is never uploaded.
How Text Is Stored in a PDF
A PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores small pieces of text, each with the position where it should be drawn, and a viewer paints them on the page. To get readable text back, a program has to decide which pieces belong on the same line, in which order to read them and where one paragraph ends. This tool does that from the positions: pieces with nearly the same height form a line, gaps wider than a normal letter gap become spaces, and a bigger vertical gap starts a new paragraph.
The result is good for ordinary documents but can be imperfect for layouts with columns, tables, footnotes or text in unusual fonts, where reading order is a judgement. If the output is empty, the PDF is probably a scan: each page is a picture, and there is no text to extract until it has been through OCR. Documents can also forbid copying in their permissions, which some programs honor.
Key Takeaways
- Checked with pdftotext: The words extracted from test documents matched the output of poppler’s pdftotext.
- Scanned PDFs: If no text is found, convert the pages to images with the PDF to Image Converter and read them with the Image to Text OCR.
- Large files: Pages are read one at a time, so long documents work, and you can choose a page range to save time.