PDF to Text — free,
extract text without uploading
Need the text out of a PDF and dragging to select is a mess? Extract it all at once here. The PDF is read only inside this browser — never sent to a server or anywhere else. Table cells come out tab-separated so they paste into Excel as columns, and pages with no text (scans) are flagged.
Works in current Chrome, Edge, Safari and Samsung Internet.
How to use it
- Drop a PDF on the box or click to choose one.
- Press Extract text. For a password-protected PDF, a password box appears.
- Copy all and paste, or Save as .txt. Untick the page markers (--- Page 1 ---) if you don't want them.
What comes out — measured
Six PDFs, extracted on 2026-11-02 in a Chromium browser. Character counts exclude spaces.
| Pages | Characters | Result | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minutes saved from Word (text, table, 2 columns) | 1 | 309 | Table cells tab-separated · left column, then right column |
| Document saved from Hangul (HWP) 2024 (60-row table) | 2 | 1,603 | All 62 table rows tab-separated |
| Web page saved as PDF from Edge | 1 | 59 | Heading and list as-is |
| Scanned PDF (images only) | 1 | 0 | Flagged as no text layer — needs OCR |
| Text page + scanned page | 2 | 309 | Page 2 flagged separately |
| Password-protected PDF | 1 | 309 | After entering the password (wrong one is reported) |
For the PDFs with text, the character counts matched another PDF library (PyMuPDF). One-page files finished in about 0.1 s.
Good to know
- Scans need OCR. Image-only pages have nothing to extract; they show 0 characters and are listed.
- Line breaks follow the page. PDFs don't store paragraphs, so lines break where they did on the page.
- Tables are tab-separated. They paste into Excel as columns, but Excel turned ‘11/5’ into a date.
- Two-column layouts came out left column first, then right (PDF saved from Word).
More
📖 Extracting text from 6 PDFs — tables into Excel, scans in Word · Compress PDF (no upload) · Combine photos into one PDF · Microsoft Print to PDF vs Save as PDF
FAQ
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. The PDF is read only inside your browser and isn't sent to a server or anywhere else. While extracting, the page made zero new network requests (checked 2026-11-02 in the browser's resource log). Keep DevTools → Network open while you extract to see it yourself.
Why does a scanned PDF give no text?
A scan is a picture of each page, so there is no text layer to extract. This tool reads the text stored in the PDF, so those pages come out empty and are flagged. They need OCR (text recognition). Opening the PDF in Word does that: on the test scan it recovered 305 of 309 characters but turned '3층' into '3증', so proofread. Microsoft's support page says Windows 11 Snipping Tool's Text actions can pull text out of a capture — I didn't test that on this PC.
Will tables paste into Excel as columns?
Yes. Wide gaps on the same line (table cells) are turned into tabs, so a row like 'Budget · Kim · 11/5' pasted into three Excel cells in my test. Excel did turn '11/5' into a date (November 5), so check date-like values after pasting.
Why do lines break in the middle of sentences?
A PDF stores lines as they appear on the page, not paragraphs, so the text comes out with the page's line breaks. Join the lines after pasting if you need flowing paragraphs.
Does it work with password-protected PDFs?
If you know the open password. A password box appears when it's needed; the password stays in your browser.
How it's built
A single HTML file. PDF reading uses pdf.js (Apache-2.0) — the same copy the PDF compressor uses.
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