Extract text
Extract text saves the PDF text into a plain .txt file, ready to open in any editor. You can pick specific pages and decide whether you want a separator between them. It is the right tool when you want the content and not the formatting: to paste elsewhere, to search, or to process the text in a program. All processing runs in your browser.
Three steps, nothing to install.
The whole job happens on your computer, start to finish.
Choose the file
Drag the PDF into the tool window, or click to pick it.
Choose the pages
Leave empty for the whole document, or give ranges and single numbers.
Download the .txt
Get a plain text file, with no formatting at all.
Does it work with a scanned PDF?
No, and it is the most important limitation of this tool. A scanned PDF is a photograph of the page: the text you see is an image, and there is no text inside the file to extract. In that case the tool tells you so instead of handing you an empty file. What solves scans is OCR, optical character recognition, and that is what the OCR tool is for: it reads Portuguese, English and Spanish and runs in your browser like every other tool here. It is the only one that needs a subscription. To know in advance whether your PDF has real text, use the PDF properties tool, which answers exactly that.
What happens to the formatting?
It is lost, and that is the point. A .txt has no bold, tables, columns or images: it has only the words. If you want to keep the appearance, the right tool is PDF to Word, which preserves more, although complex layouts do not survive well anywhere.
What is the page separation?
A line with the page number between the text of one page and the next, so you know where each part came from. You can switch it off and get the text in one continuous run.
Can I extract just one chapter?
You can. The pages field takes ranges (10-25) and single numbers (3), separated by comma.
The tool says the PDF has no text. But I can see text!
You are seeing an image of text. It is the difference between a document written on a computer and a document photographed or scanned: in the second, the letters are pixels. It is the number one reason people try to extract text and cannot. The way out is OCR, which reads the image and gives text back. Check first with the PDF properties tool, which tells you whether the file has a text layer.
The text came out scrambled, with sentences mixed up.
This happens in documents with two or more columns, and on pages with text boxes scattered around. A PDF does not store reading order, it stores chunks of text with a position each; the tool follows the order they appear in the file, which is usually right but not always. In magazines and two column academic papers, interleaving is common.
Spaces between words are missing, or there are too many.
PDFs often do not store spaces: they store the distance between chunks of text. The tool decides where a space belongs from that distance, proportional to the font size. It works well in most cases and fails on very spaced or very condensed typefaces.
The file shows odd accents when I open it.
The .txt comes out in UTF-8, which is the current standard. Some older editors assume a different encoding. Opening it with a modern editor solves it.
Questions about extracting text from PDF.
Do I need an account?
Yes. The account (magic link, no password) is needed for the subscription. This tool is part of the Premium subscription, EUR 1.99 a month, which removes the limits on every tool and adds OCR. Sign PDF opens on the free plan, with one signature a day.
Do you have OCR?
Yes, since August 2026, and it is a separate tool from this one. OCR reads scans in Portuguese, English or Spanish and returns a searchable PDF or the plain text; it is part of the paid plan. It runs on your computer like everything else, and it does not read handwriting.
How is it different from PDF to Word?
This gives plain text, with no formatting at all. The Word one tries to keep part of the appearance and returns an editable .docx.
Are my files kept on your servers?
No. Since nothing is sent, nothing is kept outside your browser.
Need the text
and not the layout?
Open the tool and try it. Nothing to install, nothing sent anywhere.
Open Extract text