PrivatePDF

Pull the text out of a PDF

Sometimes you want the words, not the document — to search them, to quote them, to feed them somewhere else. This reads the text the file already contains and hands it back as a plain text file, with the pages marked so you can find your way around a long one.

or drop a file anywhere on this panel

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How it works

  1. 01Open the PDF.
  2. 02Check the panel — it warns you if the document is a scan with no text in it.
  3. 03Choose whether to mark page boundaries.
  4. 04Download the text.

A scan has no text to extract

This is the thing that surprises people. A scanned document is a picture of words, not words, and there is nothing in the file to pull out — you would get an empty result. The panel checks each page for a text layer before you start and says plainly when a document is in that state, rather than handing you a blank file and letting you wonder. Turning a scan into text needs OCR, which is a different operation.

It reads the document, not your edits

Extraction reads the source pages. If you have added a watermark or page numbers in this session, they are not part of the text — they are marks you have layered on top, and including them would be surprising.

Reading order is the file’s, not ours

Text comes out in the order the document stores it, which for most documents is reading order and for some — multi-column layouts especially — is not. We do not attempt to reflow columns, because guessing wrong silently is worse than handing you exactly what is there.

Questions

Will I get the formatting?
No. Plain text is plain: no fonts, no bold, no tables. If you need the layout you want the PDF itself, or an image of it.
Does it extract text from images inside the PDF?
No — that is OCR, and it is a separate piece of work. This reads text that is already stored as text.
Is the file uploaded to extract from it?
No. The text is read by your own browser, which matters when the document is one you would not paste into a web form.