PDF Text Extractor — Copy Text from a PDF
Pull selectable text from every page of a PDF, or just a page range, with clear page separators. Copy it to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file — all in your browser. Scanned, image-only PDFs hold no extractable text.
🔒 Runs entirely in your browser. Your input and output are never sent to a server or stored — fully private.
⚠️ Scanned or image-only PDFs contain no selectable text, so nothing can be extracted from them.
🔒 Your PDF is read entirely in your browser — it never leaves your device.
About this tool
This tool pulls the selectable text out of a PDF into plain text you can copy or download, in your browser. Load a document, optionally choose a page range, and get the words with page separators — handy for quoting, searching, translating or repurposing content without retyping. Nothing is uploaded: the text is extracted locally with pdf.js, so your document stays private. Note that scanned, image-only PDFs have no text layer to extract.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my scanned PDF return no text?
A scanned page is really a photo of the document, so it contains pixels, not a text layer — there is nothing for the extractor to read. To get text from a scan you need OCR (optical character recognition), which is a different process. This tool reads the real text layer that born-digital PDFs (exported from Word, web pages, etc.) already contain.
Will the layout be preserved?
Extraction gives you the words as plain text, not the original layout, so columns, tables and exact spacing may not line up. It is meant for getting the content — to quote, search or translate — rather than reproducing the page design. Pages are separated by a marker so you can see where each one begins.
Is the document kept private?
Yes. The text is read by pdf.js running in your browser, so the PDF is processed on your own device and never uploaded or stored. That makes it safe to extract text from confidential contracts or reports — none of the content is exposed to a server at any point.