BrowserTools

PDF to Text Extractor

Extract selectable text from PDF files

By Guga — BrowserTools maintainer, Tbilisi, Georgia Updated 2026-09-21
Free Private No uploads
What is PDF to Text Extractor?

This reads the text objects a PDF already contains rather than looking at what the page looks like, so what you get back is exactly what was embedded in the file, in the order the page stored it. Each page is marked with a header so you can see where one ends and the next begins, and line breaks are reconstructed from the vertical position of each text run, with a new line inserted whenever the baseline moves more than a small threshold. Word and character counts update as a sanity check that nothing was dropped. You can copy the whole thing to the clipboard or download it as a plain text file. The one hard limit worth knowing: a PDF that is a pure scan has no text layer at all, and this tool does not perform optical character recognition.

Extract the embedded text from PDF files into a clean, copyable document. Keeps page structure with page breaks and shows a page count — ideal for quoting, searching and repurposing content.

Private PDF to Text Extractor In Your Browser

PDF to Text Extractor is processed locally with client-side JavaScript. Your files never touch a server, and there is no queue to wait in.

Step-by-Step

How to use PDF to Text Extractor

1

Drop a PDF with an embedded text layer onto the file area.

2

Wait while PDF.js reads the text content of each page in order.

3

Check the Pages, Words and Characters counts to confirm the extraction caught the content.

4

Use `Copy all text` to put the whole document on your clipboard, or `Download as .txt` to save it.

Key Capabilities
  • Text is read from the PDF's text layer, so the output contains the characters that were embedded rather than anything inferred from pixels.
  • Line breaks are rebuilt from vertical position changes in the text runs, preserving the visual paragraph structure.
  • Every page is prefixed with a page marker so sections stay attributable after extraction.
  • Word and character counts are shown alongside the output, giving an immediate check on whether content went missing.
Common Use Cases
  • A researcher extracts the reference list from a journal PDF so it can be pasted into a bibliography tool.
  • A writer pulls the text of a chapter out of a compiled report to quote from it accurately.
  • A developer searches inside a PDF's text from a script by extracting it to a plain file first.
Clear Answers

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my scanned PDF producing no text?
A scan is just a picture of a page. If the file has no embedded text layer there is nothing to read, and this tool does not run OCR — it extracts what is already in the file.
Why is the line and column order sometimes wrong?
Extraction follows the order the PDF stores its text objects, which is an optimisation decision made when the file was created and not a reading order. Complex multi-column layouts can therefore come out interleaved.
Does it handle documents in other languages?
Yes, any text encoded in the file comes through as stored. The only requirement is that the characters be present as text rather than as an image.
Is there a size limit?
There is no explicit cap in the code. Every page is held in memory as text, so memory use grows with the length of the document.