How to Extract Text from a PDF (Copy PDF Text Free)
You need the words out of a PDF — to quote it, reuse the content, or paste it somewhere editable — but selecting and copying page by page is painful. Here's how to extract text from a PDF for free, all at once, in your browser.
Extract PDF text in one click
Open the PDF to Text tool, upload your PDF, and click extract. You get the selectable text of every page as clean plain text you can copy or download as a .txt file. It runs in your browser — your document is never uploaded.
Why copy-paste from a PDF goes wrong
Copying directly from a PDF viewer often jumbles columns, drops line breaks, or pulls in weird spacing. Extracting the text stream gives you cleaner output, page by page, without fighting the viewer's selection.
What about scanned PDFs?
If your PDF is a scan or photo of a document, there's no selectable text to extract — it's just an image. In that case, use the Image to Text (OCR) tool: first turn the PDF pages into images with PDF to JPG, then run OCR on them.
Common uses
Quoting a report, reusing boilerplate, moving content into a doc or CMS, searching a long PDF, or feeding text into another tool like the word counter or text cleaner.
Related PDF tools
Need the pages as pictures instead? Use PDF to JPG. Merging or trimming first? See Merge PDF and Delete Pages.