📝 Extract Text from PDF Client

Your PDF is almost certainly a scanned document — a photo or image of a page rather than a true PDF with embedded text. In this case there is no text to extract; the letters are just pixels. You need OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which reads the letters from the image. Try our OCR PDF or Image to Text tool.

Sometimes text comes out garbled even from real PDFs — this happens when the PDF uses a non-standard font encoding. In that case, the underlying character codes don't match the visible letters. No extraction tool can fully fix that without OCR.

PDF pages store text as small fragments, each with its own X/Y position. With Preserve layout on, we use those positions to reconstruct approximate line breaks and indentation — better for tables, forms, and multi-column layouts. With it off, text is dumped in the order it appears in the file, which is usually cleaner for prose but mangles tables. Try both and use whichever looks better.

PDF text often has a hard line break at the end of every visual line — even mid-sentence. This makes copied text awkward: "The quick brown fox\njumps over the lazy dog." With this option ON, we detect paragraph breaks (blank lines or large vertical gaps) and merge line wraps into single paragraphs, so you get "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Ideal for prose; leave it off for poetry, code, or structured layouts where line breaks are meaningful.

Yes. Use the Page Range field. Examples: 1-5 (pages 1 through 5), 1,3,7 (specific pages), or 1-3, 8, 12-15 (mixed). Leave it blank to extract every page.

Bold, italic, font sizes, and colors are lost — this tool extracts plain text, not rich formatting. If you need to preserve formatting, use PDF to Word which reconstructs layout and styles. For plain text use cases — search, analysis, feeds — this tool is the right choice.

No. Everything runs in your browser using pdf.js. Your file never leaves your device.