How to extract text from a PDF
Need to reuse text from a PDF: a contract clause, a price list, a report? Copying a few lines with your mouse works, but for whole documents it's quicker to extract everything at once.
Extract all the text
- Open PDF to Text.
- Choose your PDF. The text appears page by page.
- Copy it, or download it as a .txt file to open in any editor.
It happens in your browser, so confidential documents aren't uploaded.
Why do I get no text?
A PDF can contain real text, or just pictures of pages. Documents saved from Word, accounting software or a website contain real text. Scanned documents and phone photos turned into PDFs contain only images; there's no text to extract. Turning images into text needs OCR (optical character recognition). A quick test: if you can't select a single word with your mouse in a PDF viewer, it's a scanned PDF.
Why does the text look jumbled?
PDFs store text as positioned pieces, not paragraphs. Columns, tables and headers can come out in an unexpected order, and long lines may be split. Plan to tidy up tables after extracting them.
Tips
- Only need part of a long document? Split the PDF first and extract just those pages.
- Some PDFs block copying with security settings; respect the document owner's permissions.
Frequently asked questions
Can I convert the text back into a Word document?
You can paste the extracted text into Word or Google Docs and format it there. Converting a PDF with its full layout into an editable Word file is a different, more complex job.
Is extraction accurate?
For digital PDFs, the characters are exactly what the document contains, because they're read directly, not guessed. The order of columns and tables may need tidying.
What about PDFs in other languages?
Text in any language can be extracted if the PDF contains a proper text layer. Some older PDFs use custom font encodings, which may produce unreadable characters.
This guide is general information, not legal, tax or accounting advice. Rules differ by country.