How to extract text from a PDF

There are two kinds of PDF. A text PDF stores real characters, while a scanned PDF stores only pictures of pages.

Check which one you have

Open the file and try to select a sentence with your mouse. If you can highlight words, it contains text.

Text PDFs

Use PDF to text. It reads the stored text page by page and lets you copy it or save a .txt file. Columns and tables may need tidying afterwards.

Scanned PDFs

Nothing can be extracted directly, because there are no characters inside. Recognizing text from pictures needs optical character recognition, which is never perfect, so we do not offer it. You can turn pages into images with PDF to JPG and use a scanning app you trust.