Extract the text layer of a PDF in your browser — page by page, ready to copy or download. Files are processed entirely on your device, never uploaded. Runs entirely in your browser — your numbers never leave this device.
This tool reads the PDF’s built-in text layer only — it does not OCR. A scanned PDF made of page images has no text layer, so it will extract little or nothing.
No PDF yet. Choose one above, then extract its text.
Your file is processed entirely in your browser and never uploaded: the PDF is opened on your own device, its text layer is read page by page, and the extracted text is shown for copying or offered as a plain-text download. Nothing reaches a server, and the tool works offline once the page has loaded. What is extracted is exactly what the file stores: a born-digital PDF — written by a word processor, a report tool, a browser's print-to-PDF — carries its words as character data with positions, and that data is what you get back.
The limit must be stated plainly, because it is the most common disappointment with tools of this kind: a scanned PDF is a photograph of pages inside a PDF wrapper. It has no text layer, so there is nothing to extract, and this tool will return little or nothing from it. No OCR is performed — the tool does not look at the page images and guess at letters, and it does not claim to. If your PDF came from a scanner or a phone camera, the words are pictures; text recognition for those belongs to a dedicated OCR application, after which the recognised text can come back here for cleaning with the text tools.
Even from a good text layer, extraction is faithful rather than beautiful. Multi-column pages can read across columns rather than down them, because the layer stores positioned fragments and the reading order is reconstructed from positions; hyphenated line-breaks in justified text may survive as hyphens in the output; tables arrive as spaced runs of words, not as a grid. The extraction is the raw material — word counts, searching, quoting, feeding into the Word Counter or a diff — and for those jobs raw and complete beats formatted and partial.
No. The file is opened and its text layer read entirely inside your browser; neither the PDF nor the extracted text leaves your device, is stored or logged, and the tool works offline.
Because a scan is a picture of a page, not text. Scanned PDFs contain images and no character data, so there is nothing for an extractor to read. No OCR is performed by this tool — you need a dedicated OCR application to recognise text from the page images first.
The text layer stores positioned fragments rather than a reading stream, and order is reconstructed from positions. Single-column documents extract cleanly; multi-column layouts can interleave at column boundaries. The words are all present — the layout they were printed in is not part of what a text layer stores.
No — they extract as the words and numbers in cell order, separated by spacing, without gridlines or column structure. For data held in a PDF table, expect to re-align the values after extraction; the figures themselves are copied exactly.
Open it in any PDF reader and try to select a word with the mouse. If words highlight, the file has a text layer and will extract. If the whole page selects as one picture, it is a scan.
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