Extract all the text from a PDF file and copy or download it as plain text. The file is read locally with pdf.js; nothing is uploaded.
Your PDF is read locally and the text is pulled out in the page. Nothing is uploaded.
What the PDF text extractor does
Open a PDF and the tool pulls the text out of every page so you can copy or download it as a plain .txt file. It uses the same pdf.js engine that powers the site’s PDF-to-image tool, and the file never leaves your device.
Frequently asked questions
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
No. pdf.js reads the text layer that the PDF already contains. A scanned image of a page has no text layer, so nothing is extracted — you would need OCR for that.
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. The file is read into the page and processed locally.
How is the output organised?
Each page becomes a paragraph separated by a blank line, preserving the reading order from the document.
How to use it
- Open the file picker by clicking the input control labelled “Choose a PDF file” and select the document from your device.
- Wait for the extracted text to appear in the output field labelled “Extracted text will appear here…”. The text loads page by page as pdf.js parses the file locally.
- Highlight the text you need inside that field and click the Copy button to put it on your clipboard.
- Click the Download .txt button to save the full extracted content as a plain-text file to your chosen folder.
Where it comes in handy
You have a 12-page lease agreement stored as a scanned-image PDF and need the rent clauses in a format you can search. The extractor pulls the built-in text layer so you get roughly 2,400 words of copyable content in under three seconds on a typical broadband connection.
A team receives monthly expense reports as 8-MB PDFs and wants to run a quick keyword count across all of them. Each report averages about 35 lines; the tool outputs them as a single .txt file you can drop straight into a spreadsheet or grep command.
You are preparing a citation pack from a 200-page academic journal issue. The text layer contains roughly 180,000 words across 42 articles. Downloading the .txt lets you split the file by page markers and paste each article into a reference manager without re-typing.
Worth knowing
- The tool reads only the PDF’s existing text layer. Scanned-image PDFs — which contain zero text objects — return nothing, so you would need an OCR step before running this extractor.
- Complex layouts with multiple columns or overlapping text boxes may produce out-of-order output. pdf.js reads content-stream order, not visual order, so multi-column magazines can come back jumbled.
- Tables, footnotes, and headers/footers are extracted as plain text with no formatting markup. Page numbers at the bottom of each page will appear in the output as regular text lines.