How to Copy Text From a PDF — Free
Need just the words, not the whole formatted file? Extract the selectable text into a plain .txt you can paste anywhere — free, in your browser.
Real-world use — what we verified
We copied text from a typed report in one click and pasted it into a note.
Honest note: this only works on text-based PDFs — a scanned page is an image, so you'd need OCR first; for those, the tool returns nothing rather than guessing.
When you just need the words
- Quoting — pull a paragraph to cite elsewhere.
- Reusing content — move text into Word, email or a database.
- Searching — plain text is far easier to grep than a PDF.
Step-by-step
- Open the text tool.
- Add your PDF.
- Click “Extract text” and save the .txt.
- Copy from the file into wherever you need it.
About scanned PDFs
If the PDF is a scan (photo of pages), it has no text layer — extraction will be empty. Those need OCR (optical character recognition) first, which is a separate step.
FAQ
Why is my export empty?
The PDF is likely scanned/image-only with no text layer. Run OCR elsewhere, then extract.
Does it keep formatting?
No — it's plain text, so headings, columns and styling are lost (that's the point).
Works on long documents?
Yes — extraction handles multi-page files and joins the text in order.