Extract all readable text from a PDF file instantly. Copy it or download as a .txt file — all in your browser.
Max 20MB
This tool extracts embedded text layers. Scanned PDFs that are just images of text without an embedded text layer require OCR, which this tool does not perform.
The tool extracts plain text in reading order. Complex layouts like columns or tables may not perfectly match the original visual structure.
No, extraction happens locally in your browser using PDF.js — your file is never uploaded anywhere.
No hard page limit, but very large PDFs may take longer to process since everything runs in your browser.
This tool reads a PDF's embedded text content and extracts it as plain text you can copy or download, using the open-source PDF.js library running entirely in your browser. It's useful for pulling quotes, repurposing document content, feeding text into another tool, or simply reading a PDF's content without opening a PDF viewer.
Most PDFs created from word processors, web pages, or design software store their text as an actual text layer — individual characters with position data — rather than as a flat image. This tool reads that text layer page by page, in the order it's stored in the file, and assembles it into a single plain-text output. Because PDF text positioning is based on coordinates rather than a linear document flow, complex layouts (multi-column pages, tables, sidebars) can sometimes extract in a different reading order than the visual layout suggests — this is a known limitation of text extraction from PDFs generally, not specific to this tool.
Not all PDFs contain a real text layer. A scanned document — a photo or scan of a printed page saved as a PDF — is really just an image, with no underlying text data to extract at all. Extracting text from this kind of PDF requires Optical Character Recognition (OCR), a more complex process that recognizes letter shapes in an image and converts them to text. This tool focuses on fast, accurate extraction from PDFs that already contain embedded text, which covers the large majority of everyday PDFs (reports, forms, invoices, articles, ebooks).
Text extraction happens entirely in your browser using PDF.js — your PDF file is never uploaded to any server, which makes this tool safe to use even with private or confidential documents.