PDF Text Extractor

What you can do

• Extract the text from a PDF and copy it as plain text.
• Convert a PDF to a .txt file.
• Copy the text of one page instead of the whole document.
• Extract a page range like 1-3, 7 instead of the whole file.
• Reflow the lines of a PDF back into paragraphs.
• Rejoin words that are hyphenated across a line break.
• Drop the header and footer that repeat on every page.

How to use the PDF Text Extractor

1. 1Drop a PDF onto the upload area, or paste one with Ctrl+V.
2. 2Wait while the pages are read. A progress bar shows how far along it is.
3. 3Keep all pages, or switch to a page range like 1-3, 7.
4. 4Set the line break, blank line and page marker options until the text reads the way you want.
5. 5Copy the text, download it as a .txt file, or open a page in the page by page list to copy that page on its own.

What can be extracted, and what cannot

A PDF written by a program (a word processor, LaTeX, a report generator, a browser's print to PDF) carries its text inside the file, and that text is what comes out here. A PDF made by a scanner or a phone camera carries pictures of pages instead, so there is no text in it to pull out. The tool says so when that happens, and the way forward is Image to Text (OCR), which recognizes words in an image, or PDF to Images to turn the pages into image files first.

Line breaks, paragraphs and hyphens

A PDF stores positions, not paragraphs. Every line sits where the layout put it, which is why extracted text usually arrives as a stack of short lines. Keeping those line breaks suits poetry, code and tables. Reflowing paragraphs joins the lines of a paragraph back into running text, which is what you want before pasting into a document. Wide gaps on the page are turned into blank lines, and you can keep them, collapse each gap to a single blank line, or remove them.

Printed text often splits a word across two lines with a hyphen. Joining hyphenated words puts those words back together and leaves the hyphen alone when the next line starts with a capital letter or a digit, so names like Mayer-Schmidt and ranges like 10-20 survive.

Page markers and repeated headers

Pages can follow each other directly, be separated by a blank line, or start with a marker line you write yourself. {page} in the marker becomes the page number and {pages} the page count, so a marker like Page 3 of 12 tells you where you are in a long export.

Long documents also repeat a title at the top and a page number at the bottom of every page, which turns into noise once the text is out of the file. The repeated header and footer option finds the lines that show up on most pages in the same spot and removes them, page numbers included, since it compares the lines with the digits masked out.

Columns and tables

Text comes out in the order the file stores it, which matches the reading order for ordinary documents. Two-column layouts and tables depend on how the file was written, so a scientific paper can come out column by column and a table row can arrive as separate lines. For those, extracting one page at a time and tidying the result afterwards works better than fighting the layout.

Send the text onward

The extracted text goes straight to Word & Character Counter for a word and character count, or to Find and Replace to clean up whatever the layout left behind. The PDF itself can be forwarded as well, for example to PDF to Images or PDF Compressor.

Credits

Open source does the heavy lifting in this tool. Thank you to:

• PDF.js

  Mozilla's PDF renderer, the same engine that displays PDFs in Firefox.

Everything this site builds on is listed on the credits page.