📝 PDF300
Get the text out of a PDF
You want to quote a paragraph, or search a document your reader will not let you select in. This pulls the text out as plain text.
Open the toolRuns entirely in your browser. The file never leaves your device.
How it works
- Add the PDFDrop the file onto the page.
- Read it outThe text appears. Copy what you need or save it as a file.
- If nothing comes outThen the pages are pictures, not text. Use OCR on the main page instead — that one reads letters out of an image.
Questions
No. This tool runs in your browser with JavaScript, so the file never leaves your device. Once the page has loaded you can even go offline and it still works.
Neither. No account, no watermark on the output. The practical limit is your device memory — large scanned files use more of it.
Guide: extracting text well
When you'd use this
Quoting a paragraph from a PDF that disables copy-paste in its viewer, pulling a document into a word processor for editing, searching a long report for one term without opening it in a dedicated PDF reader, or feeding the contents into another program that expects plain text — all of these need the words out of the PDF and into a format anything can read.
What comes out, and what doesn't
This pulls the text that is stored as actual text inside the PDF — the characters a PDF viewer lets you select and copy are the same characters this tool extracts. Formatting such as bold, italics, columns and tables is not preserved; the result is the words themselves, in reading order, as plain text. A PDF made by exporting from Word, Google Docs, or a similar program will extract cleanly. A PDF that is a scan or a photograph of a page — common for older documents, signed contracts, or anything run through a photocopier — has no text layer at all, only an image of a page, and this tool will come back empty for it. For that kind of file, use OCR instead, which reads letters out of the image itself; it lives on the main tools page as a server tool, since the text recognition step needs more processing than a browser tab comfortably provides.
Choosing a page separator
Three options control how page breaks are marked in the output: a form-feed character (invisible but recognised by many text editors and printers as a hard page break), a visible "--- Page N ---" marker (easier to scan by eye in a plain text file), or simply a blank line between pages. Pick the form feed if the output is going into software that already expects that convention; pick the visible marker or blank line if a person will be reading the raw text file directly.
More questions
The PDF is almost certainly a scan or an image with no text layer. Use OCR on the main tools page instead — it reads the letters out of the picture rather than looking for a text layer that is not there.
Not selectively from this tool — it processes the whole file. Split the document first with Split if you only need one section.
No — table layout is not preserved. Columns of numbers will usually extract as a run of text that needs manual re-separation.
Yes — there is a download option that saves the extracted text as a .txt file alongside the copy-to-clipboard option.