Extract text from any PDF file — drop it in and get clean, copyable plain text in seconds. Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
This tool extracts the actual text layer embedded in a PDF — the text that was there when the document was created or exported from a word processor. It works instantly on reports, contracts, articles, and any PDF with a real text layer.
If the PDF was created by scanning a physical document, it contains images of text rather than actual text characters. This tool cannot extract text from scanned PDFs — for those you need OCR (optical character recognition) software. Most scanned PDFs can be identified because you can't select any text when you open them in a PDF viewer.
Extracting text to copy into a document editor, feeding content into an AI tool, checking a contract's wording without a PDF viewer, pulling numbers from a report into a spreadsheet, or archiving a PDF's content as a plain text file. The downloaded .txt file preserves line breaks and paragraph spacing from the original.
Some PDFs use custom fonts or encoding schemes that don't map cleanly to standard Unicode characters. This is common with PDFs exported from older software or generated by specialized tools. The text layer is technically present but the character mapping is broken at the source — there's no way to fix this without the original document.
PDFs store visual layout, not semantic structure. Columns, tables, headers, and sidebars all get flattened into a linear text stream. The paragraph order may follow reading order rather than visual position, so a two-column layout will often come out as one column of text rather than left-column-then-right.
No. The entire extraction happens in your browser using the PDF.js library. Your file never leaves your device.