Last checked by the TextEditor.com team
How to get the text out of a PDF
- Open the fileDrop the PDF on the box or click to choose it. The text shows in a second.
- Pick the line styleKeep the lines as they are, or join them into paragraphs.
- Copy or saveClick Copy all text, or download a .txt file you can open anywhere.
The text is read in your browser with pdf.js, the same reader Firefox uses to show PDF files. Your file is never sent to a server.
Keep line breaks or join lines?
A PDF stores each line of a page on its own. It has no idea where a paragraph starts. If you copy the text as it is, every line ends with a break, even in the middle of a sentence. That looks fine in a list or a poem, but it is messy in an email or a document.
"Join lines into paragraphs" puts the lines of a paragraph back together. It starts a new paragraph where the gap between lines is bigger, or where a short line ends a sentence. A word split with a hyphen at the end of a line is joined back into one word. Already copied text with broken lines from somewhere else? Paste it in remove line breaks.
Keep line breaks
Join lines into paragraphs
What the converter keeps
| In the PDF | In the text |
|---|---|
| Normal text | Kept, in reading order on most pages |
| Line breaks | Kept, or joined into paragraphs if you choose |
| Bold, italic, fonts, colors | Lost. Plain text has no formatting. |
| Tables | Each row becomes a line, with the cells side by side |
| Two columns | Usually read one column after the other. Some files mix them. |
| Pictures and charts | Left out. Words inside a picture are not text. |
| Scanned pages | No text. The page warns you and lists those pages. |
Why a scanned PDF has no text
A scanner or a phone camera makes a photo of the page. The PDF then holds pictures, not letters, so there is nothing to copy. To turn a photo of words into text you need OCR, a program that reads the shapes of the letters. This page doesn't do that, but many scanner apps and some phone camera apps do.
More PDF tools
To change the pages themselves, open the PDF editor. You can merge PDF files into one, or split a PDF into parts.