Selecting text in a PDF and pasting it often gives you a mess. If you need all the words from a long document, there is a faster way using PDF to Text.
The quick method
- Open PDF to Text and add your file.
- Press Extract text.
- Download the .txt file. Each page is marked, so you can find your way around.
No text was found. Why?
There are two kinds of PDF. Some contain real text, made on a computer. Others are only pictures of pages, like a scan or a photo. A picture has no text inside it, only pixels. To get words out of those you need OCR, a technology that reads pictures of text. Our tool does not do OCR, so it tells you honestly when your file is a scan.
How to tell which kind you have
Open the PDF and try to select a sentence with your cursor. If you can highlight individual words, it has real text. If the whole page highlights as one block, it is a picture.
What you will get
Plain text only. Fonts, tables and layout are not kept, but the words and their order are. That is exactly what you want when you need to paste content into an email, a document or a text analysis tool.
Only need some pages?
Cut out the part you want first with Extract Pages, then run the shorter file through PDF to Text. For a quick overview of a file before you start, PDF Info shows page count and file properties.
If your PDF is a picture
You can still turn its pages into images with PDF to JPG and run those through an OCR app. For a document with selectable text, no OCR step is needed.