Copy text out of a PDF — and what to do with a scan

The job

You need the text inside a PDF — to quote it, paste it into a document, or feed it to another tool. Two very different files both look like a page of text: one has real embedded characters, the other is a photograph of a page.

Try the extractor first

Open PDF to text, drop the file in, and run the extraction. If the PDF contains embedded text, the result appears in seconds — copy it or download it as a .txt file. Pages are separated by a marker line like ── Page 3 ── so you can tell where each page starts.

• Embedded text keeps its reading order, but PDF layout rarely survives: columns, tables, and line breaks may come out flattened.
• Up to 25 MiB and 60 pages per run.

When nothing comes out

If the tool reports no text found, the PDF is a scan — its words exist only as pixels in an image. No text extractor can help; you need OCR. A practical browser-local path: convert each page with PDF to image, then run the PNG through an OCR tool you trust. For one or two pages, re-typing is often faster.

Limits

Encrypted PDFs are not supported. Extraction quality depends on how the PDF was produced — ligatures, custom encodings, and vertical text can come out reordered or with missing spaces. Check the output before quoting it.