Pull the text out of a PDF to copy it, search it or feed it to something else. It reads the text layer the document already carries — the same one you select with the mouse in a reader.
A PDF does not store paragraphs: it stores runs of text with a position. Here they are grouped by their height on the page, which is the closest thing to what you read; anything cleverer starts guessing at columns and gets it wrong.
How to use it
- Drop in the PDF.
- Choose whether to join the wrapped lines.
- Download the .txt or copy it.
Frequently asked questions
- It gives me nothing — why?
- Because the PDF is a scan: pages that are photographs, with no text layer at all. Reading those needs OCR, which is a different thing and not what this tool does.
- What does joining wrapped lines do?
- It merges the line breaks that exist only because the page ran out, and keeps the ones that separate real paragraphs. Turn it off if you want the text exactly as laid out.
- Does it respect columns and tables?
- Not really. The text comes out in the order it sits in the document, which on a two-column page is often not the reading order.
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