A PDF page is a list of drawing instructions, and the words on it are usually real text objects rather than a picture. This page reads those objects directly, so you get characters you can search, quote and edit, without the file ever leaving your computer.

How to use it

1. 1 Drop the PDF onto the box, or click it and pick the file.
2. 2 Set the page range if you only need part of it, and choose whether to keep the line breaks.
3. 3 Press Extract, then copy the result or download it as a .txt file.

Extraction is not the same as OCR

If the PDF came out of a word processor or an invoicing system, the characters are already inside it and reading them is exact. If it came from a scanner or a phone camera, the page is just a photograph and there is nothing to read; recognising those letters is optical character recognition, a different and far less reliable job. This tool tells you which case you are in instead of returning an empty box.

Where the line breaks come from

A PDF does not record lines or paragraphs, only text placed at coordinates. The reader groups pieces that sit at the same height into one line and starts a new one when the height changes. That works well on ordinary documents and imperfectly on multi column layouts, where the two columns of a page can interleave.

Choosing pages

The range box takes single pages and ranges, separated by commas. Repeats are dropped and the pages are read in order, so writing them out of sequence is harmless. An out of range number is refused rather than silently ignored, because a quietly skipped page means missing text you never notice.

1-5        → 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
2, 7, 9    → 2, 7, 9
1-3, 10    → 1, 2, 3, 10
(bos)      → every page

A note on formatting

The output is plain text, so bold, headings, tables and images do not survive; a table becomes rows of words with the cell boundaries gone. If you need the layout preserved, converting to a document format is the right tool, and if you only need the pages as pictures, the PDF to JPG and PDF to PNG pages do that.