Get the text out of a PDF quickly
Copying text from a PDF with the mouse is often painful: selection skips lines, page headers get copied every time and two-column layouts get mixed up. PDF to text extracts all the text at once, page by page, and shows it in a box from which you can copy it with one click or download it as a TXT file.
It is useful when you want to quote part of a law, decision or research paper, translate the text, reuse it in your own document or process it in another program.
Which PDFs does it work with?
The tool works with PDFs that contain real text – files exported from Word, Excel, a browser or other programs. You can recognise them because you can select individual words in a PDF reader. Scanned documents, however, are just images of pages and contain no text; they require optical character recognition (OCR), which this tool does not perform. The tool will warn you if no text is found.
Privacy
Text is extracted in your browser and the document is not uploaded. The TXT file is saved in UTF-8, which every modern program opens correctly, including accented and Cyrillic characters. The layout of complex pages (multiple columns, tables) may differ from the original, because TXT does not support formatting.