PDF to Text

The PDF to Text tool extracts readable text from PDF files in plain text format. Useful for copying content out of PDFs for editing, searching, analysis, or repurposing. Works on text-based PDFs (where text is embedded as actual characters) directly; for scanned PDFs (images of text), optional OCR converts the images back to text.

Upload your PDF and get extracted text. Layout preservation options: plain (just raw text, simplest), with line breaks (preserves paragraph structure), with columns (attempts to detect multi-column layouts and reorder for correct reading order). Headers, footers, and page numbers can be stripped for cleaner output. All processing runs in your browser using PDF.js or similar libraries. Extracted text can be copied to clipboard or downloaded as .txt file.

PDF text extraction depends on how the text is stored:

1. Embedded text (most PDFs): text is stored as character codes with position information. Extraction reads these directly.

2. Image-based PDFs (scanned documents): text exists only as pixels in images. Requires OCR to convert back to text.

3. Hybrid PDFs: some pages have embedded text, others are scans. Extraction handles embedded text directly, OCR for scan pages.

For embedded text, PDF.js reads the text stream from each page. Each text run has position (x, y), font, and content. Raw extraction gives the text in the order it appears in the PDF stream, which may not match reading order for complex layouts (multi-column, sidebars, tables).

Reading order reconstruction: sort text runs by position. Typically top-to-bottom, left-to-right. For multi-column layouts, detect column boundaries first, then read each column top-to-bottom.

Layout options:
- Plain: all text concatenated, some whitespace preserved
- Line breaks: preserve newlines for paragraph structure
- Columns: attempt to detect and preserve column structure
- Table extraction: detect tabular data and output as CSV-like format (imperfect)

Headers/footers: often appear on every page. Detection: text that repeats at same position across pages is likely header or footer; optionally stripped.

Page numbers: similar detection. Numbers at consistent bottom/top positions across pages.

OCR (for scanned PDFs): uses Tesseract.js or similar JavaScript OCR library. Slower than text extraction but handles scanned documents. Accuracy varies by scan quality — clean scans get 95%+, poor scans can be 70-85%.

Character encoding: PDF text can use various encodings (WinAnsi, MacRoman, Unicode). Extraction normalizes to UTF-8. Some PDFs with custom encodings may produce garbled text; those need manual encoding fix.

Font handling: PDFs may use custom fonts with non-standard character mappings. Extraction reads Unicode equivalents via the font\u2019s ToUnicode map. If ToUnicode is missing, extraction may fail or produce garbage.

Performance: text extraction of 100-page PDF takes 2-10 seconds depending on complexity. OCR of same takes 30 seconds to several minutes.

Compared to Adobe Acrobat Pro text extraction, this tool is free. Acrobat has superior handling of complex layouts and non-standard fonts; this tool covers common cases well.

Compared to pdftotext (command line), this tool has a browser UI with layout options. pdftotext is great for automation; this tool for interactive extraction.

Compared to copying text manually from a PDF viewer, this tool processes whole document at once with layout cleanup. Manual copy works page by page but is slow for long documents.