How to use PDF to Text
- 1Add your PDF. Text is extracted automatically.
- 2Turn page markers on or off, or join lines into paragraphs for easier pasting.
- 3If some pages are scans, choose the document language and click OCR.
- 4Copy the text or download it as a .txt file.
Readable output
Text is rebuilt from the position of each word on the page, so lines and paragraph gaps come out the way they look instead of as one long line. Join lines into paragraphs removes the hard line breaks inside paragraphs and repairs words hyphenated at line ends, which is handy for pasting into an email or a document.
OCR for scanned PDFs
If a page has no text layer, the tool tells you how many pages are affected and offers OCR. Pages are rendered at up to 300 DPI and read by the Tesseract engine running in your browser. The engine and language data (a few megabytes) are downloaded the first time you use OCR; your PDF itself is never uploaded. OCR accuracy depends on scan quality, and handwriting is not supported.
Limits
Multi-column layouts and tables are extracted line by line, so columns may need light cleanup. Password-protected files can be opened with their password.
Frequently asked questions
Why is no text found in my PDF?
The PDF is probably a scan or photos of pages. Use the OCR button that appears to read the text from the images.
Which OCR languages are supported?
English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean.
Is my PDF uploaded for OCR?
No. OCR runs in your browser. Only the OCR engine and language files are downloaded the first time.
Does it keep formatting?
Line breaks and paragraph gaps are kept. Fonts, bold text and table borders are not, since the output is plain text.