How to extract text from a PDF
- Choose your PDF.
- Decide whether to add page separators (handy for long documents) and whether to join broken lines into flowing paragraphs.
- Press Extract text. The text appears in the box below.
- Copy it or download it as a plain .txt file.
Why does my PDF give no text?
There are two kinds of PDF:
- Digital PDFs are created from Word, Google Docs, a website or accounting software. They contain real text, and this tool extracts it instantly and accurately.
- Scanned PDFs are photographs of paper pages. They contain only images of text, so there is nothing to extract. To get text from these you need OCR (optical character recognition), which reads the letters in the image.
A quick test: open the PDF and try to select a word with your mouse. If you can highlight individual words, it is a digital PDF. If the whole page selects as one picture, it is a scan.
About line breaks
PDFs store text as positioned fragments, not as paragraphs. The extractor rebuilds lines from the positions of the text on each page. By default each line in the PDF becomes a line in the output, which keeps addresses, tables and poems readable. Tick Join broken lines to merge lines into paragraphs — better for articles and reports you want to paste into a word processor. Hyphenated words split across lines are re-joined.
What you can do with the text
- Edit the content of a document you only have as a PDF.
- Paste it into a translator or AI tool.
- Count words with our Word Counter — useful for translation quotes.
- Search through long reports, or reuse quotes with correct spelling.
Layout and languages
Plain text has no columns, fonts or images, so complex layouts such as multi-column newsletters or tables may come out in a different reading order. Text in any language stored correctly in the PDF — including Bangla, Arabic and Chinese — is extracted as Unicode. Some older PDFs use non-standard font encodings (common with legacy Bangla fonts such as SutonnyMJ), which can produce garbled characters; that is a limitation of how the PDF was created.
Frequently asked questions
Can I extract text from a scanned PDF?
Not with this tool. Scanned PDFs contain images of text, which need OCR (optical character recognition). An OCR tool is planned for this site.
Does it keep formatting such as bold and tables?
No. The output is plain text. Line breaks and page breaks are kept, but fonts, colours and table borders are not.
Why does Bangla text look garbled?
Some PDFs made with older non-Unicode Bangla fonts store text in a custom encoding. The tool extracts exactly what is stored, which then looks wrong. PDFs made with Unicode fonts extract correctly.
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. The text is extracted in your browser and never sent anywhere.