scriptiii
100% Client-Side

Text layer, page by page

PDF to text

Get the words out of a PDF without retyping them. Page breaks are kept, and pages that hold only an image are reported honestly.

The text is extracted in this browser tab. Your document is never uploaded.

Short answer: drop the PDF and the text appears in the box, page by page, ready to copy or download as .txt. If a page is a scan with no text layer, the page number is named — nothing is invented to fill the gap.

Text layer versus pixels

A PDF made from a word processor stores characters; a PDF made by a scanner stores a picture of them. Only the first kind has text to extract. That is why a “PDF to text” result can be perfect on one file and empty on the next — the difference is in the file, not in the tool.

Where the layout goes

Extraction keeps words and page breaks, and loses columns, tables and font sizes. For a contract that is fine; for a financial statement you want the table structure, which is what PDF to JPG plus a spreadsheet gives you instead. Choose the tool by what the next step needs.

PDF to text questions

Why is the extracted text empty or garbled?

A scanned page has no text layer — it is a picture of text, so there is nothing to extract and this tool says which pages those are instead of guessing. Garbled output usually means the PDF stored a font subset without a usable character map.

Does this run OCR on scanned documents?

No. OCR is a different operation with a different accuracy story, and pretending a scan was read would be worse than saying it was not. The tool names the pages it could not read.

What order does the text come out in?

Page order, with a form feed between pages so the page breaks survive a paste into an editor. Within a page, the text follows the order the PDF stores it, which is usually reading order and can differ in multi-column layouts.

Is my document uploaded to read it?

No. The file is parsed by a PDF engine running in this tab, and the text never leaves the page. Nothing is stored anywhere.

Related tools

PDF to JPGTurn the pages into images instead.DOCX to MarkdownThe same job for a Word file.HTML to MarkdownStrip markup down to plain text.