PDF to Text

When the text comes out garbled

Sometimes extraction returns text, but it is wrong: random symbols, boxes, or letters shifted along the alphabet. That happens when the PDF's fonts carry no map from their glyphs back to real characters, which some design and print software leaves out. The page looks right because it draws shapes; the characters underneath are not the letters shown. Treat that file as a scan and run it through scanned PDF to text.

Milder oddities have simpler causes: fi and fl joined into a single ligature character, or a word split in two because the PDF places each letter separately.

Tidying extracted text

Printed lines come out as separate lines, so a paragraph arrives with a break after every few words, and words hyphenated at a line end stay split. Running headers, footers, and page numbers repeat once per page among the body text. Clear those before quoting or reusing the text, and delete the page labels if the text is going somewhere as one piece.

For a word or character count of a document, paste the cleaned text into the word counter; counting straight from the raw output includes every header and label.

How to use it

1. Choose a PDF.
2. Extract the text.
3. Copy it or download a .txt file.

Privacy & limitations

The file is opened and rewritten in your browser and never uploaded, which is the point when the document is a contract, a scan, or anything else you would not hand to a stranger. A scanned PDF contains no text to extract, and is reported as such rather than returning an empty file.