PDF Text Extractor

About PDF Text Extractor

The PDF Text Extractor pulls the plain text out of a PDF and hands it back as text you can copy, search, count, or paste anywhere — no formatting, no markup, just the words. It reads the document’s own text layer through a local copy of Mozilla’s pdf.js, so the result is the real selectable text rather than anything guessed from an image, and the file never leaves your browser. That last part is the point for PDFs specifically: the documents people most need to get text out of are contracts, invoices, statements, research papers, and unpublished drafts, none of which belong on a stranger’s server. Three output styles cover the usual reasons for extracting: paragraphs rebuilt from wrapped lines for reading and for feeding to an LLM, one line per line of the PDF for grepping and diffing, and a spacing-preserved layout view for forms, receipts, and anything laid out in columns. It works on documents that already contain text; a scan or a photograph has no text layer to read and is detected and reported rather than silently returning an empty file.

Key features

• Runs entirely in your browser — the PDF is parsed locally and never uploaded
• Three output styles: reflowed paragraphs, strict line-by-line, or original layout preserved with spacing
• Page ranges — extract just "1-3, 7, 10-" instead of splitting the file first
• Joins words hyphenated across a line break so search and word counts are correct
• Strips repeated running headers, footers, and page numbers detected across the document
• Optional "--- Page N ---" markers so you can tell where each page began
• Whitespace clean-up: normalise spacing inside lines and collapse runs of blank lines
• Opens password-protected PDFs — the password is used locally to unlock the document
• Word, character, line, and page counts, plus how long the read took
• Copy the text with one click or download it as a .txt file
• Detects scanned PDFs with no text layer and says so instead of returning nothing
• Every option is applied instantly — changing one never re-reads the file

How to use it

1. Drop a PDF onto the box or click to choose one (up to 50 MB).
2. Wait for the page-by-page progress bar to finish reading the text layer.
3. Pick an output style: Paragraphs for reading, Line by line for searching, Keep layout for columns and forms.
4. Optionally type a page range — leave it blank for the whole document.
5. Toggle the clean-up options (hyphen joining, header removal, blank-line collapsing) to suit the document.
6. Copy the text or download it as a .txt file.

Tips & common mistakes

• This tool needs a real text layer. If you see the "scanned PDF" notice, the pages are images and there is nothing to extract without OCR, which is not included.
• Use "Keep layout" for invoices, receipts, bank statements, and anything in columns — it keeps the horizontal spacing, which is the closest a PDF table gets to staying readable as text.
• Use "Line by line" when you are going to grep, diff, or script over the output. Paragraph reflow is a heuristic; line-by-line is exactly what is on the page.
• Turn on hyphen joining before counting words or searching — otherwise "inter-" and "national" split across a line break will never match "international".
• Header and footer removal only triggers for lines that repeat across at least half the pages, so a one-off heading in the top margin is safely kept.
• For LLM prompts, use Paragraphs with page markers off — it produces the fewest tokens and no layout noise for the model to trip over.
• Text order in a heavily multi-column layout is best-effort. Check the result around figures, sidebars, and footnotes, where reading order is hardest to infer.
• Only after the text of a few pages? Pull those pages out first with the PDF Splitter, or stitch several reports together with PDF Merge and extract the text in one pass.
• If the file is password protected, enter the password when prompted — it is used only locally to unlock the document for reading.

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