How to Extract Text from PDF Online
Extract all text content from your PDF documents with PDF Play. Our free online PDF to Text converter reads your PDF file and outputs a clean .txt file containing all the text from the document. Upload your PDF, click Convert Now, and download the extracted text instantly. This is the simplest way to get the raw text content out of any PDF document for use in emails, reports, databases, or any other application.
Why Extract Text from PDF?
There are many reasons to extract text from PDF files. You might need to copy content from a PDF into an email, a web form, or another document. You might want to search through the text of multiple PDFs or import PDF content into a database or content management system. Text extraction is also useful for creating summaries, performing text analysis, or repurposing content for different formats. Our PDF to Text converter handles the extraction quickly and accurately, saving you the tedious work of manually copying text from each page.
Use Cases for PDF Text Extraction
Exporters extract text from shipping documents, certificates of origin, and customs declarations for data entry into their systems. Researchers extract text from academic papers and reports for analysis and citation. Content creators extract text from PDF articles and brochures to repurpose for websites, blogs, and social media posts. Legal professionals extract text from contracts and legal filings for review and comparison. Our tool makes all of these tasks faster and more efficient by automating the text extraction process.
What to Expect from the Output
The text extraction process reads all visible text from your PDF and outputs it as a plain text file. The text follows the reading order of the document, typically from top to bottom and left to right. Paragraphs are separated by line breaks. Tables may appear as tab-separated or space-separated text. Headers, footers, and page numbers are included in the extraction. Formatting such as bold, italic, fonts, and colors is not preserved in the text output since plain text files do not support formatting. The focus is on capturing the content accurately.
Tips for Better Text Extraction
For the best results, use PDFs that contain actual text rather than scanned images. Text-based PDFs (where you can select and copy text in a PDF viewer) produce accurate extractions. Scanned PDFs contain images of text, which our tool cannot read. If you have a scanned document, you would need OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software first. Our converter supports PDFs up to 50 MB. After extraction, open the text file and review the content for accuracy and completeness.