PDF to text

PDF to text reads the text layer out of a document and hands it back as a .txt or .md file, over a page range you choose. Text is recovered from the page's own content stream rather than by recognising shapes, so it comes back exactly as it was stored. A scanned page has no text layer at all, and this tool says so rather than handing you an empty file.

How it works

  1. Open the PDF Drop the file onto the page. The text of the first page appears straight away.
  2. Choose the pages Every page, or a range such as 1-3,7.
  3. Pick how pages are separated A blank line, a marker naming each page, or nothing at all.
  4. Check the result Character and word counts update live, and the text can be copied as well as saved.
  5. Save as .txt or .md The file is written in your browser and handed to you as a download.

Questions

Why does my scanned PDF produce no text?
Because there is none in it. A page produced by a scanner or a phone camera is a photograph wrapped in a PDF, and the words you can read are pixels rather than characters. Recovering them needs optical character recognition, which file4edit does not do, so the tool tells you it found no text rather than saving an empty file.
Why is the text order sometimes wrong?
PDF stores text as positioned fragments with no notion of reading order, so a two-column layout or a page with sidebars can interleave when it is read back in the order the fragments were written. Simple single-column documents come out in order; complex layouts may need tidying.
Are the words run together?
The tool inserts a space where the gap between two fragments is wide enough to be one. PDFs that position every character individually can still produce the occasional join, which is a property of how the file was written rather than of the extraction.

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