Drop in a PDF, draw around the parts you need, copy the text. One paragraph, a whole section, several pieces from different pages — and nothing you leave out, like footnotes or captions. Nothing is uploaded: it all happens in this browser tab.
How to extract text from a PDF
Drop your PDF into the box above, or click "Select from device". Its pages appear as previews.
Draw around the text you need — drag a box over a paragraph, a section or a table. Draw several boxes, on any pages: they're read in the order you draw them, and each box is numbered so you can see the order.
Click "Extract text". The text appears below — edit it if you like, then Copy or Download .txt.
Want everything? Don't draw anything and click "Extract all text".
Why draw instead of copy and paste?
- Skip what you don't want. Footnotes, page numbers, headers and picture captions stay out — just don't draw over them.
- Columns stay apart. Copying from a two-column PDF often mixes lines from both columns. Draw one box per column and each comes out whole.
- Clean paragraphs. Wrapped lines are joined back into paragraphs, while short lines — a heading, a list item, "Sincerely," — keep their line break. Prefer the original line breaks everywhere? Tick Keep the original line breaks.
Your document goes to someone else's server, and you still have to check that it took the right section and left out the footnotes.
You point at exactly what you need. The text is read inside your browser — your document never leaves your device.
Good to know
- Scans and pictures of text have no real text inside. Areas on a scanned page can be read with text recognition (OCR) — Premium; it runs in your browser too.
- Tables come out as plain text, row by row — not as a spreadsheet.
- Unusual fonts, complex layouts and some languages can come out in the wrong order or with mistakes. Take a quick look at the text before you use it.
Free and Premium
15 pages a day
- Every tool except OCR — merge, split, compress, redact, sign, edit, convert (incl. PDF to Word), extract text
- No watermark, no account, no email
- Counted across all tools; the count resets every day
$9/month
- No page limit on any tool
- OCR: make scanned PDFs searchable, 39 languages
- Your signature saved on this device (never uploaded), and your signature or initials on every page in one click
- One-click form filling with your saved details — name, address, email
- Or $69/year · $149 once, for life
Free or Premium, the tools work the same way: your files never leave your device.
On the free plan only the pages you take text from count: copying a paragraph from page 12 of a 100-page file uses 1 of your 15 pages.