PDF to Text
Pull the text out of a PDF and take it as plain text, Markdown or a Word document.
Document
Runs in your browser. Your file is never uploaded.
How it works, and what that means for the result
A PDF does not store sentences. It stores fragments of text, each with a position, a font and a size, and the paragraph you see on screen is an effect of where those fragments happen to sit. Reading a PDF back into text therefore means reconstructing something the file never held: working out which fragments share a line, where a word break belongs, and where one paragraph ends and the next begins.
That reconstruction is done here by grouping fragments that sit at the same height, ordering them across the page, and inserting a space wherever the gap between two of them is wider than the characters around it. Ordinary prose comes back cleanly. The places to check are multi-column layouts, tables and running headers, where a human eye uses visual grouping that the coordinates alone do not capture.
Join lines back into paragraphs
PDFs break lines wherever the page was justified, so text copied straight out arrives with a hard break at the end of every printed line. That is right for poetry, code and addresses, and wrong for prose you intend to edit. Tick the option and lines are joined back into paragraphs, with a break kept only where the previous line ended short or in a full stop — the two signals that reliably mark the end of a paragraph rather than the end of a line.
If nothing comes out
The document is a scan. A scanned or photographed page holds a picture of writing, and a picture has no text layer to read, which is why every extraction tool returns an empty box on one. What is needed there is optical character recognition, which looks at the shapes and works out the letters. That is a different job and it lives on PDF to Text with OCR. This tool checks for the condition and says so rather than leaving you wondering.
Four ways to take the text
| Output | What you get | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Copy | The text on the clipboard | Pasting into something you already have open |
| .txt | Plain UTF-8 text | Scripts, search, archiving |
| .md | Text with page markers as Markdown rules | Notes and documentation |
| .docx | A Word document with paragraphs and page breaks | Editing, tracked changes, sending on |
About the Word file
The .docx is written in the browser and opens in Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice and Pages. It is worth being clear about what it is: a Word document carrying the text of the PDF, with its paragraphs and page breaks intact. It is not a visual reproduction — fonts, columns, images and exact positioning are not reproduced, because it is built from what the pages say rather than from how they look. For editing, quoting and reworking a document that is what you want. For a pixel-faithful copy, keep the PDF.
A .docx is really a ZIP holding a few XML files, which is why this can be done without a server: the archive writer this site's PDF tools already use to bundle split files builds the package directly.
Which pages
Leave the pages box empty for the whole document, or narrow it: 1-5 for the opening, 12- for everything from page twelve, 3, 9, 14 for three specific pages. On a long report this is the difference between extracting one chapter and extracting four hundred pages you then have to search through.
Questions
Is my PDF uploaded to extract its text?
No. The document is opened and read inside your browser and the text never leaves it. There is no backend, so nothing is transmitted and nothing is stored.
Why does my PDF produce no text at all?
Almost certainly because it is a scan. A photographed or scanned page is an image of writing, not writing, so there is nothing to read out. The tool detects this and points you at the OCR version, which recognises the letters in the picture instead.
Can I get a Word document out of it?
Yes. The Word option builds a .docx that opens in Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice and Pages, with the paragraphs and page breaks of the original. It carries the text rather than the visual design: fonts, columns and images are not reproduced, because it is built from what the page says rather than from how it looks.
Why is the spacing different from the PDF?
A PDF stores fragments of text at coordinates, not sentences, so lines and word breaks have to be inferred from where those fragments sit. Ordinary prose comes out cleanly. Multi-column layouts, tables and running headers are where reconstruction is hardest, and those are worth a check.
Does it keep the page order and page breaks?
Yes. Pages are read in document order, and the page separators can be turned on in the options so you can see where each one began. The Word export turns them into real page breaks.
Can I extract text from only part of the document?
Yes. The pages box takes a range such as 1-5 or 12-, so a single chapter can be pulled out of a long report without reading the rest.
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