Copy the text out of any digital PDF
Copying text from a PDF viewer often breaks lines in odd places or misses pages. This tool reads the text from every page you choose and puts it in one box, ready to copy into Word, Google Docs, notes or an email, or to download as a .txt file.
Useful for students and office work
- Quote a passage from a research paper without retyping it.
- Check the length of a PDF essay with the Word Counter.
- Reuse your own old documents when the original Word file is lost.
- Paste PDF text into a translator or a search.
Why does it say no text was found?
Some PDFs contain only pictures of pages, for example a scan, or a PDF made from phone photos. There are no letters inside, only pixels, so there's nothing to extract. Reading those needs OCR (optical character recognition), which this tool doesn't do. Converting the pages to images with PDF to Image and using an OCR app is one way round it.
What is kept and what isn't
| Kept | Not kept |
|---|---|
| Words, numbers and line breaks | Fonts, colours and bold or italic |
| Page order (with optional page markers) | Tables as columns, images and charts |
Multi-column layouts may come out as one long column; a quick tidy-up in your editor usually fixes it.