Convert PDF to text

To convert PDF to text, copy it straight out of a PDF viewer, save it as plain text from Acrobat or Preview, or run pdftotext for whole folders; a scanned PDF needs OCR first. PDF Viewer on this site does not write a TXT file, but it does the two things that matter most: it OCRs scans in the browser, and then you can select and copy the text without uploading anything.

Text PDF or scan: the only question that matters

Extracting text only works when the PDF has text to extract. Open the file in the viewer and try to select a line with the mouse, or press Ctrl+F and search for a word you see. If selection works, every method below applies. If the cursor selects nothing, the page is an image.

For a scan, run OCR on the PDF. The viewer recognizes the text with tesseract.js inside the browser (language follows your browser setting, English by default) and adds an invisible text layer; it takes tens of seconds per page on a laptop, so start with the pages you need. After that, select the text on the page, copy it, and paste it into any editor. The scan never leaves your device. The scanned PDF guide covers the details.

Which PDF to text method for which case

Main method: copy from the viewer, pdftotext for bulk

Copy from the viewer:

1. Open the PDF in the viewer by dragging it onto the page or with the Open a PDF button.
2. If it is a scan, click OCR in the toolbar and wait for the pages to finish.
3. Drag across the text to select it, press Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on Mac).
4. Paste into Notepad, TextEdit, an email or a code editor.

pdftotext for whole files and folders:

1. Install Poppler (Homebrew on Mac, package manager on Linux, a Windows build added to PATH).
2. Run pdftotext -layout input.pdf output.txt. Drop -layout if you want flowing text rather than aligned columns.
3. Add -f 5 -l 9 to extract pages 5 to 9 only; use a shell loop for a folder.

Acrobat Pro: File, Export To, Text (Plain). Google Docs: upload, Open with Google Docs, File, Download, Plain Text. Online extractors exist, but they require uploading the document, which is unnecessary when every OS already has a free way.

What gets lost and how to fix it

• Line breaks. PDFs store lines, not paragraphs, so pasted text has a hard return after every line. In Word, Find and Replace ^p with a space, then restore paragraph breaks; in a code editor, join lines with a regex.
• Column order. Two-column layouts can come out interleaved. pdftotext without -layout usually detects columns; the viewer copies in reading order for most text PDFs.
• Hyphenation. Words split at line ends keep their hyphens.
• Ligatures and symbols. fi and fl ligatures, bullets and math symbols may paste as odd characters depending on the fonts.
• Headers, footers and page numbers are mixed into the text; strip them with a search.
• Formatting. Bold, headings and tables are gone by definition; use PDF to Word if you need them.

Text from a PDF on a phone and in bulk

On an iPhone, open the PDF in Files or Safari and long-press the text to select it; for a scanned PDF, Live Text recognizes the words on screen after you tap the text-select button in the viewer. On Android, Google Lens in the Files or Drive preview does the same; both send nothing anywhere for a text PDF, while Lens may use Google's servers for recognition. The viewer on this site also works on phones for normal-size files; large scans with hundreds of pages are slow or run out of memory there, so OCR those on a computer.

For thousands of files, a script is the only sane route. With pypdf in Python: text = ''.join(p.extract_text() for p in PdfReader('f.pdf').pages). pdftotext is faster and better at reading order, so most pipelines call it in a loop and only fall back to a library when they need per-page positions. Scans in the batch need an OCR step; command-line Tesseract or ocrmypdf adds the text layer before extraction.

Check the result

Count something: the number of pages or section headings in the PDF should match what you see in the text. Keep the PDF open in the online PDF viewer and use search inside the PDF to compare a few sentences from the middle and the end, where column mix-ups show up first. For OCR output, read every number and proper name against the page image.

Frequently asked questions