Get the words out of a PDF
When you need to quote, reuse or reformat what is inside a PDF, retyping it is painful. This tool pulls the selectable text straight out of a PDF into plain text you can copy or download. It runs entirely in your browser, so your document is never uploaded, and it is free and unlimited.
How it works
- Upload your PDF and the tool reads its text layer instantly.
- Copy or download the result as plain text, ready to paste anywhere.
Digital PDFs versus scans
This reads the real text already stored inside a digital PDF, the kind exported from a word processor or a web page. If a PDF is a scan or a set of photos, it has no text layer, so there is nothing to extract, and reading it would need OCR (optical character recognition), which is not supported yet. If you get an empty result, that is almost always why.
Private by design
The extraction happens locally in your browser, so your document never leaves your device, which matters for contracts, reports and anything confidential. It pairs with the rest of the Etoolio PDF toolkit, all of which run the same private, in-browser way, free and unlimited.