How to copy all the text from a PDF at once (free)

How to copy a PDF's text all at once

Open the "Extract text" tool, upload the PDF and click "Extract and download": a .txt file with the same name as the PDF downloads, holding the text of every page in sequence. It works on PDFs that contain real text, the kind where you can select words with the mouse. A scanned PDF needs OCR (text recognition). Everything happens in your browser.

1. Open "Extract text" and upload the PDF. You can upload several: you get one .txt per PDF.
2. Click "Extract and download" (with several files, the button reads "Extract from 3 PDFs", for example).
3. Open the .txt in any editor and copy what you need, or use search (Ctrl+F) to find a word across the whole document.

The tool only reads: the original PDF stays exactly as it was, with no changes, and the .txt is a new file next to it. If you only want the words, delete the PDF afterwards; if you want both, keep both. If you want more than the words, convert the PDF to editable Word or Excel to keep the formatting, or to Markdown to get headings and lists marked.

What the text looks like

• Plain text, UTF-8, accents preserved. The file has the same name as the PDF with a .txt extension.
• Pages come one after another, separated by a blank line.
• Line breaks follow the PDF's: where the document ends a line, the .txt does too. Pieces on the same line are separated by a space.
• The order is the order in which the pieces appear inside the file. On two-column pages the text may come out interleaved; check it before reusing.
• Columns, tables, bold, font size and the exact position of things are left behind. What you take away are the words.
• There are no options and no page selection: it is the whole document, in one go. The limit is 2 GB per file.

Real text or a scanned image?

There are two kinds of PDF. The native one, generated by a computer, stores the text inside the file: it is the kind where you run the cursor over the words and select them. The scanned one is really a photo of the page: it looks like text, but the computer sees only an image, and nothing is selectable. The "Extract text" tool is for the first case and only reads text that already exists, which is why it is fast and faithful to the original. On a scanned PDF it finds nothing and shows the notice "This PDF has no extractable text (it may be a scanned document)".

In that case, the OCR tool recognizes the letters inside the image, also in your browser, and saves a .txt. The step-by-step instructions, with the language choice and the scanning tips, are in the OCR guide.

When it's worth extracting the text this way

• Reusing the content of a report or contract in a word processor, without retyping anything.
• Pasting long passages into an email, a message or a presentation.
• Searching for a word across the whole document after opening it as plain text.
• Moving the content into a spreadsheet or another tool that only takes text.
• Keeping a lightweight, words-only version of a heavy PDF full of images.
• Counting words or proofreading in a checker that doesn't open PDFs.

Common problems and what to do

• "This PDF has no extractable text": the file is scanned or was saved as an image. Use OCR.
• Words run together or lines out of order: that is how the PDF was generated, common in documents with columns, text boxes or tables. Tidy it up in the editor after pasting.
• Blank text or odd symbols: some embedded fonts have no mapping to real letters. OCR fixes that too, because it reads the page as an image.
• Something is missing: repeated headers, footers and page numbers do go into the .txt; watermarks made as images do not.
• "Could not extract the text.": usually a password-protected or damaged PDF. Remove the password with the Remove PDF password tool and upload it again.

All of the extraction happens inside your browser: the PDF is read on your own device and is never uploaded to any server.

Only need a few pages? Extract the whole document and trim it in your editor: since every page ends with a blank line, it is easy to find the passage you want and delete the rest.