What is it?
PDF to Text copies all the text out of a PDF so you can edit, search, translate or paste it elsewhere.
Who is it for?
Students and researchers quoting from papers, office staff copying data from reports, translators, and anyone who needs to edit or search the words of a PDF without retyping them.
How to use it
- Tap Choose a PDF. The text appears in the box, and the message counts the words found.
- Tap Copy text to paste it somewhere, or Download .txt to save it.
“No text found”
The PDF is made of pictures, usually because it was scanned or photographed. Its pages hold images of letters, not real text. Convert the pages with PDF to Image, then read them with Image to Text (OCR).
The text comes out jumbled
- Columns: newspapers and two-column papers may come out line by line across both columns. Copy one column at a time from a PDF reader instead.
- Tables: the cells come out as text separated by spaces. For tables, open the PDF in Excel or Google Sheets, which can import tables from PDFs.
- Strange characters instead of letters: some PDFs, often older Hindi or Punjabi ones made with fonts like Kruti Dev, store letters in a private code. The text can’t be read correctly; use OCR on the page images instead.
Good to know
- Line breaks follow the PDF’s lines. Text Cleaner can join broken lines back into paragraphs.
- Text you are allowed to see but not copy is still read, as long as the PDF opens without a password.
Are my files uploaded?
No. The file is opened and processed inside your browser, on your own phone or computer. Nothing is sent to us, and closing the page clears it.
Open the tool: PDF to Text
Still stuck?
Contact support. Tell us which tool or page you were using, what you tapped, what you saw, and your phone or computer and browser (for example: Android phone, Chrome). We reply by email.
Questions, or an error not listed here?
Tell us in the comments: what you were doing, the exact message you saw, and your device and browser. We read every comment and add new fixes to this article.