PDF to Text Converter

The tool reads the text that is stored inside the PDF. It does not look at the picture of the page, so it only works when the file contains real text.

1. Drag one PDF onto the box, or click the box to choose it. Password-protected files are rejected with a message asking you to remove the password first.
2. Tick Add a marker line between pages if you want to see where each page begins. The marker looks like --- Page 2 of 9 ---. Leave it off for continuous text.
3. Press Extract text. A progress note shows the page being read.
4. Read the text in the box under the result. Use the copy button to place it on your clipboard, or download it as a .txt file named after your PDF.
5. Check the note, which gives the number of pages, the number of words and the size.

The tool uses pdf.js to read the text layer page by page. A PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores small pieces of text at positions on the page, so the tool joins the pieces into lines using the line breaks the file declares and the vertical position of each piece. A new line starts when the position moves down, and several blank lines are reduced to one.

For example, a hypothetical 9-page report might produce a note such as "9 pages, 3,210 words, 18.4 KB". With the marker option on, the text from the second page begins after a line reading --- Page 2 of 9 ---, which makes it easy to find a page again or to split the text back apart.

To check beforehand whether a PDF has a text layer, open it in any viewer and try to select a sentence with the mouse. If the words highlight, the text is there. If the whole page highlights as one block, or nothing highlights, the page is a picture.

This tool does not do OCR, which means recognizing letters in a picture. A scan, or a photo of a page, has no text layer, and the tool then says so. In that case use the image to text converter on the page images, which you can create with the PDF to JPG converter.

Even when text is present, the result is not always in the order you read it. Please keep these limits in mind:

• Multi-column pages, tables and unusual fonts can come out in a different order, or with words split in odd places.
• Words hyphenated at the end of a line stay hyphenated, as they are in the file.
• Headers, footers and page numbers are included each time they appear.
• Images and charts are not described. Any text inside an image is not found.
• A password-protected file is rejected. The tool does not try to bypass passwords, so remove the password only for files you are allowed to open.

A short read-through is always worth doing, especially for tables and for names or numbers you plan to reuse.

Extracted text usually needs a little tidying before you paste it elsewhere. Lines break where the PDF page broke, not where a sentence ends. The remove line breaks tool joins those lines back into paragraphs. If spaces are doubled or lines are padded, whitespace remover cleans them up. Repeated headers and footers can be taken out with the duplicate line remover, although it removes every repeated line, not only the headers.

When you want to know how long the text is, the word counter reports words, characters and reading time.

Use the text for your own reference, quoting and editing, and respect the copyright and the terms attached to the document. The whole process takes place in your browser, so a confidential document stays on your device.