How it works
The PDF Text Extractor reads all text from a PDF document and exports it as plain text or structured Markdown — preserving reading order and heading hierarchy. Use it to copy text from scanned PDFs (with OCR), extract data for processing, or convert PDF content for editing in a text editor or word processor.
Copying text from a PDF manually is unreliable: column layouts produce garbled paste order, text boxes in slide-to-PDF conversions paste out of order, and scanned PDFs (images of pages) produce nothing at all when you Ctrl+C. This tool handles all three cases.
How to use it: upload your PDF. Text extraction begins automatically. Choose the output format: - Plain text: linear text, one paragraph per block, for maximum compatibility - Markdown: headings detected and formatted with #, bold detected via font weight, lists preserved - CSV: for tables detected in the PDF (column-separated text output)
OCR for scanned PDFs: if the PDF contains only scanned images (no embedded text), enable OCR mode. The tool runs a browser-based OCR engine (Tesseract.js) on each page image. OCR adds processing time (~2–10 seconds per page) but recovers text from image-only documents.
Accuracy: text extraction from PDFs with embedded text is highly accurate. OCR accuracy varies by scan quality, font, and language — 95-99% character accuracy for clean, high-resolution scans in English.
Privacy: text extraction and OCR run in the browser. No document content is transmitted.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Yes — enable OCR mode. The tool renders each page to an image and runs Tesseract.js (a browser-based OCR engine) on it. OCR adds processing time but recovers text from image-only PDFs. Accuracy is 95-99% for clean, high-resolution scans in English.
- PDF does not inherently store text in reading order — text blocks are positioned at X/Y coordinates and may not be stored in left-to-right, top-to-bottom sequence. The tool uses a reading order algorithm to sort text blocks by position, but complex multi-column layouts may produce imperfect ordering. This is a fundamental PDF limitation.
- Yes — enable Table mode to output detected table content as CSV or TSV. The tool identifies rows and columns based on spatial text alignment. Complex merged-cell tables may require manual cleanup.
- In Markdown mode: text with larger font size is converted to Markdown headings, bold text (detected by font weight) is converted to **bold**, and italic to *italic*. In plain text mode, only the character content is preserved — no formatting. Layout whitespace (indentation, column alignment) is preserved where possible.