PDF to Text

What this tool does

PDF to Text pulls the text layer out of a PDF using pdf.js and rebuilds readable lines and paragraphs. Choose pages, keep the column layout for tables, join hyphenated words, and copy or download the result as a .txt file.

Copying text out of a PDF viewer often goes wrong: line breaks appear in the middle of sentences, columns get interleaved, and long documents need page-by-page selection. When you want to quote a report, feed a document into another tool, or search it with your own scripts, plain text is far easier to work with.

This tool reads the text layer with pdf.js, then groups the individual text fragments into lines by their vertical position, orders them left to right, and inserts spaces where there are visible gaps. Blank space between lines becomes paragraph breaks. Scanned pages that contain only images have no text layer, and the tool reports how many such pages it found. Everything runs locally.

How to use PDF to Text

1. Drop a PDF onto the upload area.
2. Optionally type a page range in Pages, for example 5-12.
3. Choose whether to include Page separators between pages.
4. Switch on Keep layout for tables and multi-column forms, or leave it off for flowing paragraphs.
5. Leave Join words hyphenated across lines on to repair words split at line ends.
6. Press Extract text, then copy the result or download it as a .txt file.

Tips for better results

• Keep layout uses spaces to mimic horizontal positions, which preserves table columns when viewed in a monospaced font.
• The Characters and Words figures are handy for estimating translation or reading time.
• If the text contains odd symbols instead of letters, the PDF uses fonts without a proper character map; the text cannot be recovered reliably without OCR.
• For very long documents, extract in page ranges to keep the output manageable.

Common use cases

• Quoting passages from a research paper or report.
• Getting the text of a contract into a diff tool to compare versions.
• Feeding invoices or statements into a spreadsheet or script for processing.
• Making a PDF readable for screen readers or text-to-speech.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Expecting text from scanned documents. Image-only pages need optical character recognition, which this tool does not perform.
• Using Keep layout for prose, which adds runs of spaces that make copying awkward.
• Assuming the reading order of complex magazine layouts will match the visual order; sidebars and captions can appear between paragraphs.