Extract Text from PDF - Free Text Grabber
Extract text from PDF files without broken lines or mixed-up columns. Scans are read with OCR, tables stay tidy, and nothing leaves your browser. Free to use.
- Free to use, no login
- Runs locally in your browser
- Clean output, no stamp
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Pull plain text out of a PDF
Drag in the PDF you need words from, or several at once. If a file is locked, type its password when asked.
Decide how the words should come out (flowing paragraphs, original lines or a spaced layout), narrow a lone file down to certain pages and say how to treat scans.
Look over the result, tweak a word if needed, then hit Copy text or save it as a .txt.
Built for people who need the words, not the PDF
Columns untangled
Newsletters, research papers and brochures set in two or three columns come out one column at a time. Each sentence stays whole, and a word broken across lines with a dash is stitched back together.
Ready to paste anywhere
Want reflowing paragraphs for a doc, the exact PDF lines for a script, or a spaced copy of a price list? Pick one, and flip to another style in the result window at no extra wait.
Works on scans too
A page that is only a picture gets read by OCR, with a choice of 37 languages. If a digital PDF hands you nonsense characters, force OCR on every page to read what is actually printed.
Batch jobs, zero installs
Drop a whole stack of PDFs and grab them back as separate .txt files in one ZIP. Repeating page headers and page numbers can be filtered out. It is all done by your browser tab, with no account required.
Extract text from PDF for real-world tasks
Selecting a page with the mouse and pressing copy rarely works well on a PDF. Lines snap in the wrong places, the left and right columns get interleaved, and footers land in mid-sentence. This toolbox reads where each word sits on the page and puts the words back together in the order a person would read them, so what you paste is usable straight away.
Who uses it and for what
- Students: pull quotes from journal articles and lecture handouts into notes without fixing every line break by hand.
- HR teams: take the wording of a CV or a policy PDF and paste it into an applicant system or an intranet page.
- Freelancers and translators: feed a client brief to a translation tool or an AI assistant as clean, reflowing paragraphs.
- Office staff: lift invoice lines or a bank statement with the Keep layout style so amounts still sit in columns.
- Real estate agents: copy a lease clause or a property description into an email or listing.
- Teachers: reuse questions from an old worksheet PDF, even a photocopied one, in a new test.
Tips for a cleaner result
For a scanned file, set the OCR language to the language printed on the pages; English is always added as a backup. Switch on page separators when you need to cite a page number later. If an old Windows program shows accented letters wrongly, open More options and add a UTF-8 BOM or pick CRLF line endings.
Where it falls short
Handwriting is not recognised well, Arabic or Hebrew may come out in visual rather than logical order, and huge documents on a phone can run out of memory, so convert them a range of pages at a time.
Other ways to get content out of a PDF
Questions people ask about this task
How can I copy text from a PDF that will not let me select it?
If the page is a scanned image, keep Scanned pages (OCR) on Auto and the tool reads it for you. If the text is selectable but pastes as gibberish, choose Every page so it is read from the picture instead of the faulty text layer.
Can I extract text from only a few pages of a long PDF?
Yes, when you work on one file. Type something like 2-5, 9 or 12- in the Pages box and only those pages are processed.
Will extracting text from a PDF mess up a table?
Each table row stays on its own line, with tabs between the cells, so pasting into Excel or Google Sheets puts values into separate cells. Choose Keep layout if you want the table to look aligned in a plain text editor.
Can I get rid of page numbers and headers in the extracted text?
Turn on the option that removes repeating headers and footers. Lines that come back at the top or bottom of most pages, page numbers included, are dropped from the result.
Do I need to install anything to pull text out of a PDF?
No. The page works in a modern browser on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android or iPhone. Only OCR needs a one-time download of language data, a few MB, the first time you read a scan.
Does my document get sent anywhere?
No, the file is opened by your own browser and the words are pulled out on your device. A password you type is used only to open the PDF and is not stored.