PDF to Text Extractor — Pull Selectable Text from a PDF

This PDF to text extractor pulls out the selectable text from a PDF and writes it to a plain .txt file. Everything happens inside your browser using pdf.js, so the document content never leaves your device — important when the PDF contains confidential information.

Extracting PDF text is the first step in countless workflows: feeding a document into an LLM, searching across a stack of contracts, building a quick word count, copying a quote without typing it out, or auditing a paper for citations. PDF viewers let you select text manually, but for anything longer than a page that quickly becomes tedious.

The tool reads each page through pdf.js, walks the text layer, joins runs of glyphs in reading order, and concatenates the result with page breaks. The output is plain UTF-8 text with no formatting — no bold, no headings, no tables — because those concepts do not exist in the underlying PDF text layer.

This will not OCR a scanned PDF. If your PDF is a series of page images (typical of scanned receipts or older documents), the tool will return empty or near-empty text. For scans, you need a real OCR pipeline first.