Why Would You Need to Extract Text From a PDF?
It happens more than you would expect:
Whatever the reason, our PDF to Text tool gets it done in seconds.
How to Extract Text From a PDF — Step by Step
Step 1: Open the PDF to Text tool in your browser.
Step 2: Upload your PDF file.
Step 3: The tool reads through every page and extracts all the text.
Step 4: You will see the extracted text in a box. You can:
The whole process usually takes under ten seconds, even for long documents.
Does It Work on All PDFs?
There are two types of PDFs:
Type 1 — Digital PDFs: Created from Word documents, Google Docs, or design software. These contain real text that can be selected. This tool works perfectly on these.
Type 2 — Scanned PDFs: These are photos of paper pages. The text is just a picture — there is no real text inside the PDF. This tool cannot extract text from scanned PDFs because technically there is no text to extract, only pixels.
To tell which type you have: open the PDF and try to click and drag over some text. If the text highlights, it is Type 1. If nothing happens, it is a scanned PDF.
Will the Formatting Stay the Same?
The extracted text will be plain text — no bold, no italic, no tables, no columns. Everything becomes a simple flow of words. Paragraph breaks are usually preserved.
Tables may not come out perfectly because they use columns in the PDF that plain text cannot represent. But all the words will be there.
Is My Document Safe?
Yes. The entire extraction process happens inside your browser using PDF.js — the same library used by Google Chrome and Firefox to display PDFs. Your document is never uploaded to any server. It never leaves your device.
After extracting the text, you might want to use our Word Counter to see how long the document is, or paste the text into our Case Converter if you need to change the capitalisation.