Runs in your browser · nothing is uploaded
PDF to text.
Every page, in order — and it says which pages had nothing to give.
Drop a PDF here
or pick one from your device
Everything happens on your device
Reading…
What comes out
- The words, in reading order
- Page by page, as the document stores them. Layout, columns and tables are not reconstructed — this is text, not a copy of the design.
- A note where there was nothing
- Scanned pages hold no text at all. They are named on screen, and you can read them with OCR in one click.
- Copy, or a .txt file
- Whichever is faster for what you are doing next.
50 MB per file
Reading the pages…
Extracted
Reading the scanned pages…
The text
Locked document
This PDF needs its password
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What it actually does
Text out, not a layout
A PDF stores glyphs and where to put them, not paragraphs. Extraction reads them back in the order the document draws them, which is reading order in almost every document and is not in a few.
- Empty pages are named
- A scanned page contains no text, so nothing can be extracted from it. Rather than hand you a short file and let you find out later, the pages are listed and OCR is one button away.
- Tables come out as lines
- Columns are a visual arrangement, not something the file records. A table extracts as the words in it, in draw order. If you need the structure, keep the PDF.
- Nothing is uploaded
- The whole thing runs in your browser, including OCR. We record an anonymous count that an extraction happened — never a filename and never a character of your document.
Answers
Questions people ask
Why is my file empty?
Because it is a scan: a picture of a document rather than a document. There is genuinely no text inside it to extract. Press “Read those pages with OCR” and the words are recognised from the pixels in your browser.
Can I get a searchable PDF instead of a .txt?
Yes — that is a different tool on this site: make a scan searchable. It writes the recognised words back into the PDF instead of handing you a text file.
Why are the words in a strange order?
Some documents draw their text out of order — a two-column layout that draws both columns line by line, or a form whose labels were added after its boxes. The extraction follows the file. Nothing can recover an order the document never stored.
Get the text out of a PDF
Free, no account, no watermark, and the file never leaves your device.