Extract Text

Pull selectable text into a TXT file

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Drop files here, or click to select

One file at a time · max 200MB · processed locally

How to use

Purpose

Extract all selectable text from a PDF, page by page, and download as a plain-text TXT file. Extraction runs locally in your browser via pdfjs-dist parsing of text objects. No upload, no watermark, no limits, free. Use it to copy report text into Word for further editing, take notes from an ebook chapter, search contract clauses, or feed clean source text into analysis pipelines.

Steps

Drag or pick the PDF
Check left-side file info (page count, presence of text layer)
(Optional) Toggle "Insert page break markers" for visual separation
(Optional) Toggle "Preserve paragraph breaks" (off keeps original line wrap)
Pick output encoding: UTF-8 (recommended) or GBK (legacy Windows compatibility)
Click "Process"
The right-side panel shows the page-by-page text preview
Click "Copy all" to clipboard, or "Download .txt" to save

FAQ

Will my PDF be uploaded?: No. Text extraction uses browser-local pdfjs-dist to parse the PDF's internal text stream — all work happens in memory and the source never goes to any server.
Why can't I extract text from scanned PDFs?: Scans are image-based PDFs with no text layer — there's nothing to extract directly. Run them through the OCR tool first to add a searchable text layer, then Extract Text will work.
Why does the extracted text have layout artifacts?: PDFs lay out visually (multi-column, tables, mixed image-text) — converting to plain text inevitably loses structure. The tool emits text in the PDF's stored reading order; multi-column papers may interleave columns. For layout-preserving extraction, copy-paste manually or use a PDF→Word converter.
How do I fix garbled output?: Usually caused by PDFs using custom CID encodings without a ToUnicode map. Standard extraction can't recover those characters — run OCR to re-recognize from the page image.
Can I extract just specific pages?: Yes. Enter a page range (e.g., 1-3,5) under "Page selection".

Use cases

Pull body paragraphs from a PDF report into Word for editing
Take notes from an ebook chapter for citation
Extract contract clauses for full-text grep with your editor
Export thesis text for summarization or machine translation
Batch-extract text from many PDF reports for downstream data analysis

Tip

If the output columns look misordered, copy the same passage in a regular PDF reader and check — the ordering quirk often comes from the PDF itself, not the tool. For strict table preservation, consider a dedicated PDF→Excel tool.