How to extract all the text from a PDF

To extract all the text from a PDF, open it in a PDF to text tool and save the result as a plain .txt file, or copy it straight to your clipboard. You get every word without the layout, fonts or images. If the PDF is a scan, run OCR first so there is text to extract.

Why pull text out of a PDF?

Plain text is the most flexible format there is. Once the words are out of the PDF, you can:

• paste a quote or a paragraph into an email or a message;
• reuse content from a report without retyping it;
• feed it into a translation tool;
• search across many documents with ordinary text search;
• keep a lightweight copy that opens on any device;
• read it with text-to-speech or a screen reader.

Copying a few lines by long-pressing works for short passages. For a whole document, extracting all the text at once is much faster.

How to convert PDF to text on your phone

1. Open the PDF to text tool and choose your file.
2. Run the extraction.
3. Read through the preview to check the text came out.
4. Copy all of it, or save it as a .txt file.
5. Give the file a clear name so you can find it later.

The text keeps paragraphs and line breaks where possible, but it will not keep bold, colours, tables or images. That is the point of plain text: it is just the words.

What if the PDF is a scan?

Many PDFs, especially those from scanners and phone cameras, are pictures of pages. There is no text inside them to extract. A PDF to text tool will return an empty result or only a few stray characters.

Test it first: try to select a word on the page. If nothing highlights, the PDF needs OCR (optical character recognition), which reads the image and adds real text. Our guide to making a scanned PDF searchable explains the process. Once OCR is done, extract the text as normal.

Problems you may see in extracted text

PDFs are designed for display, not for clean text export. You may notice:

• Broken lines. Sentences may break at the end of each printed line. Joining them takes a moment in a text editor.
• Hyphenated words split across two lines, such as "docu-" and "ment".
• Columns mixed together. Two-column layouts can be read across instead of down.
• Headers and footers repeated on every page, such as page numbers and the document title.
• Odd characters where the PDF uses an unusual font encoding.

These are quirks of the PDF format rather than faults in the tool. For long documents, a quick tidy-up pass in a text editor usually fixes them.

Text or Word: which do you need?

If you want to keep headings, styles and images and then edit the document, convert to Word instead. The PDF to Word guide covers that. If you only need the words, plain text is smaller, simpler and opens anywhere.

Things you can do with the extracted text

• Translate it. Plain text is easy to translate in full. Or translate the PDF directly with a tool designed for documents. See how to translate a PDF on your phone.
• Summarise it. Paste it into a summary tool, or ask questions about the original PDF instead. See how to summarise a PDF and ask it questions.
• Make a new PDF. Edit the text and turn it back into a clean PDF.
• Archive it. A folder of .txt files is easy to search years later.

A note on copyright and privacy

Extracting text from a document you own or have permission to use is fine. Publishing large parts of someone else's work is another matter, so check the rights before you reuse text. And if the PDF is private, extract it on your phone rather than through a website that uploads the file.

Extracting text with PDF Burrow

PDF Burrow has a PDF to Text tool that pulls all the text out of a PDF so you can copy it or save a .txt file. For scanned documents, run Make Searchable (OCR) first, which works on your device. Both tools process the file on your phone, so it is not uploaded.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my extracted text empty?

The PDF is almost certainly a scan with no text layer. Run OCR on it first, then extract the text again.

Can I extract text from just one page?

Many tools extract the whole document. If you only want one page, save that page as a separate PDF first, or copy the part you need from the extracted text.

Does PDF to text keep tables?

Not as tables. The cell contents come out as text, usually separated by spaces or line breaks. If you need the table structure, try converting to Word.

Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?

Only after opening it with the password. Some PDFs also block copying through restrictions, which you can remove only if you own the file or have permission.