Extract Text from PDF

Quick answer: Extract all text from a PDF into a plain .txt file for notes, translation, or analysis. Open PDF 转文本 — everything runs locally in your browser, and files never leave your device.

Steps

1. Upload the PDF to the PDF to Text tool.
2. Preview the extraction result.
3. Download the .txt or copy the text directly.

Important notes

• PDF line breaks come from layout, not sentences — expect mid-sentence wraps and merge them with find-and-replace.
• Scanned PDFs return nothing because they have no text layer; run OCR first.
• Two-column academic layouts interleave columns; for order-critical use, convert to Word and check manually.

Common questions

The output is gibberish — why? A few PDFs carry broken character maps (common from old typesetting software); PDF to Word usually survives them better.

Can I keep the paragraph structure? TXT has no formatting — use PDF to Word or PDF to Markdown for structure.

Pro tips

Plan the post-processing before you extract, because raw PDF text always needs it: hard line breaks mid-sentence (from page layout) are the number-one artifact — a find-replace that joins lines within paragraphs fixes most of it, and the Regex Tester helps you prototype that pattern. Hyphenation at line ends leaves "exam- ple" fragments that need merging. For research use, keep the page boundaries as markers (extract page by page) so citations stay accurate. And remember the extraction is only as good as the text layer — a PDF that renders beautifully can still have a garbage-layer from bad fonts.

Can I extract text in reading order for two-column PDFs? Column detection handles most modern PDFs; academic two-column layouts occasionally interleave — spot-check the transition between columns.