Text without retyping
You need just the maintenance section from a water heater manual. You'd like to move three definitions from a course reader into your notes. You want the ingredient list from an e-cookbook for a message. Selecting with the mouse in a PDF reader often lets you down: it skips a line, grabs the header of every page or shuffles two columns. PDF to text goes through the whole document, page by page, and puts all the text into one box.
What you get
The text shows up as soon as you choose the file. A line under the options tells you how many pages the document has and how many characters were found. While "Mark the start of each page" is on, a line like "--- Page 1 ---" comes before the text of each page; switch it off and the text runs without those markers. "Copy all text" copies everything at once, and "Download as TXT" saves a file named after the PDF, in UTF-8, so accented and Cyrillic letters are kept.
Limits worth knowing
- Scanned documents. A scanned PDF holds pictures of pages, not letters. Those need optical character recognition (OCR), which this tool does not do. If hardly any text is found, the tool warns you.
- Formatting. You get plain text: lines stay as in the original, but fonts, colors and tables are gone, and multi-column pages may come out in a different arrangement.
- Locked PDFs. Open a password-protected document with Unlock PDF first.
Privacy and related tools
The reading is done in your browser and the document is not uploaded. If you need the layout with tables and images as well, use PDF to Word; for the look of a page as a picture there is PDF to JPG.