How to extract text from a PDF (copy & edit it)

You have a PDF and you need the words inside it — to quote it, translate it, or paste it somewhere else. Retyping is slow and error-prone. Extracting the text gives you everything in a few seconds, ready to copy.

Two kinds of PDF

Some PDFs contain real, selectable text — those extract instantly. Others are really just scanned images of pages, where the 'text' is a picture. For scanned documents you need OCR, which reads the letters out of the image; our Image to Text tool handles those.

What you can do with the text

Once extracted, the text is yours to use: paste it into a document, translate it, search it, or feed a quote into an email. It's far faster than retyping a long report or contract by hand.

Private and free

The extraction runs in your browser, so the PDF stays on your device — useful for confidential documents. Open the PDF to Text tool, add your file, and copy the text that comes out. No sign-up, no limits.