Toolkeel

PDF to text

Pull the text out of a PDF so you can edit, search, translate or quote it. Works with documents created digitally; scans need OCR.

  • Free
  • No upload
  • No sign-up
  • No watermark
or drop it here One PDF, up to 100 MB.
Stays on this device. Network requests since you started: 0 How to check this yourself
  1. Your documentsRead from your device
  2. Worked on in this tabBy code running in your browser
  3. Saved to your deviceYou download the result

Never sent to a server. See how to check

How to use it

  1. Choose a PDF.

  2. Wait a moment while the text is read.

  3. Copy it or download it as a .txt file.

About this tool

PDFs created from Word, Google Docs, websites or accounting software contain real text, which this tool reads with Mozilla's pdf.js and puts in a plain text box. Line breaks are rebuilt from the position of the text on the page; columns and tables come out as plain lines.

Scanned documents are photographs of pages and contain no text to extract. If the tool finds almost nothing, that is the reason: you would need OCR (optical character recognition), which this site does not offer yet.

Good to know

  • No OCR: scanned PDFs return little or no text.
  • Layout (columns, tables, fonts) is not preserved.
  • Some PDFs encode text in a way that extracts as odd characters.

Frequently asked questions

Why is the extracted text empty?

The PDF is probably a scan, which contains images of text rather than text. Extracting it requires OCR.

Can I extract text from just one page?

Extract the whole document and copy the section under that page's "--- Page N ---" marker, or split the page out first.

Does it keep formatting?

No. You get plain text, which is ideal for editing or pasting elsewhere.

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Last updated 2026-10-20 by the Toolkeel team. How we build and check our tools.