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Utlty

PDF to text

Pull the text out of a PDF to copy, search or edit.

Updated

How to extract text from a PDF

  1. Drop a PDF into the box above, or choose one.
  2. The text appears straight away, page by page, with a blank line between pages.
  3. Copy it, or download it as a .txt file.

Which PDFs have text?

PDFs made by saving or exporting from Word, Google Docs, a browser or an accounting app contain real text, which comes out cleanly. PDFs made by scanning paper or photographing pages contain only pictures of text. If you can't select a word in your PDF viewer, there's no text layer, and this tool will tell you so.

Common uses

  • Quoting from a long report. Copying across pages in a PDF viewer is fiddly. Extract the whole text, then copy the passages you need into an email, notes or document.
  • The original file is lost. Only have the PDF of a letter or CV you wrote? Pull the text out and paste it into a new document to edit, then add the formatting back.
  • Searching or counting the text. Extract the text to search it in your own editor, paste it into the word counter, or compare two versions with the text diff tool.

Questions

Why does it say no text was found?

Scanned documents and photos of pages store text as pictures, not as characters, so there's no text to extract. Reading text from images needs OCR, which this tool doesn't do.

Is the formatting kept?

You get plain text with line breaks. Fonts, colors and tables aren't kept, and text laid out in several columns may come out column by column.

Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?

Not directly. Remove the password with Unlock PDF first, then extract the text.

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