How to Extract Text From a PDF
Copying text out of a PDF by hand is a particular kind of tedious. You drag across a paragraph, the selection jumps a column, you try again, and you still have forty pages to go. The PDF Text Extractor pulls the whole document's text out at once.
What this is good for
Quoting from a report without retyping. Moving a document's contents into a word processor to rework it. Searching a file your reader won't search properly. Getting a rough word count, or feeding the text into another tool. Anything where you need the words rather than the pages.
How to pull the text out
Open the tool and choose your PDF. The text from every page is pulled out and laid out in order, ready to copy in one go.
The one thing that decides whether this works
There are two kinds of PDF that look identical on screen and are completely different underneath. One contains real text - characters stored in the file, which you can select with your mouse. The other is a picture of a page, produced by a scanner or a phone camera, where the writing is just pixels.
Extraction works on the first and finds nothing in the second, because there's nothing in it to find. The quick test takes a second: open the document and try to select a line of writing with your cursor. If a text highlight appears, you're fine. If nothing happens, or the whole page highlights as one block, it's a scan.
For a scanned document you need OCR, which reads the letters out of the image. The PDF to Word Converter does that in twelve languages and gives you an editable file.
What you lose, and why
Extraction gives you the words in reading order. It does not give you the document. Headings stop being headings and become ordinary lines, tables lose their columns, and anything that depended on where it sat on the page - a figure caption, a sidebar, a signature block - arrives as text with no indication of what it was.
That is a reasonable trade when you want the content. It is the wrong tool when you want the document, and the usual mistake is reaching for extraction to edit a report. For that, convert to Word with the PDF to Word Converter, which keeps the structure as well as the words.
Columns are the other thing to check. Most layouts read correctly, but an unusual one can interleave two columns into alternating lines.
Common questions
Will the layout be preserved?
Not as a layout. You get the words in reading order, not the columns, tables and spacing they sat in. For a document where the layout matters, convert to Word instead.
Does it handle multi-column pages?
Mostly. Columns are read in order, though unusual layouts can interleave - worth a quick check on anything complicated.
Does extraction change the original PDF?
No. Nothing is written to the file; the text is read out of it.
Why is some text missing from the result?
Almost always because that part of the page is an image rather than text - a logo, a scanned signature, or a figure with its labels baked in.
Need the words rather than the document?