Extract the text from a PDF as plain text. Lines and paragraphs are rebuilt from the page layout, and you can join the hard line breaks that PDFs put in every paragraph. Copy it or save a .txt file. Free, and your PDF never leaves your browser.
No PDF yet. You can also drop a file on this box.
A PDF doesn't store paragraphs. It stores pieces of text, each drawn at an x/y position on the page. This page uses pdf.js, the PDF engine built into Firefox, to read those pieces, then puts them back together: a new line when the vertical position changes, a blank line when the gap is bigger than a normal line, and a space when two pieces sit apart on the same line. "Join into paragraphs" goes one step further and removes the line breaks inside each paragraph, so pasted text flows normally in an email or a document. Words split with a hyphen at the end of a line are joined back together.
| What you see | Why, and what to do |
|---|---|
| No text at all | The PDF is a scan or a photo: the pages are images with no text layer. You need OCR software for those (for example Tesseract, or the OCR in Adobe Acrobat or Google Drive). |
| Random symbols | The PDF's fonts have no Unicode map, so the letters can't be decoded. It happens with some old or hand-made PDFs. Printing to a new PDF rarely helps; OCR does. |
| Columns mixed together | Text comes out in the order it was drawn, which for most files is column by column. If a file mixes them, convert a page range at a time and fix it by hand. |
PDFs printed by a browser keep their text, so they stay searchable, copyable and readable by screen readers. That includes PDFs made with the Shotmint API, which prints any URL or HTML in Chromium:
curl "https://shotmint.creasework.com/v1/pdf?url=https://example.com&format=A4" -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" -o page.pdfEach render is 1 credit. €5 buys 2,000 with no subscription, and credits never expire. Try it without a key on URL to PDF or HTML to PDF.
Is my PDF uploaded? No. The text is extracted by JavaScript on this page, so contracts, statements and medical records stay on your device.
Does it keep tables and formatting? No. The output is plain text: bold, colors and images are dropped, and table cells come out as words separated by spaces. Use PDF to image if you need the page as it looks.
Can it read password-protected PDFs? Yes, if you know the password. The page asks for it, and the password stays in your browser too.
Is there a size limit? No limit and no signup. Very large PDFs depend on your device's memory, so use a page range if your browser struggles.
Related: sign PDF, fill PDF form, PDF to image, merge PDF, split PDF, rotate PDF, watermark PDF, image to PDF, URL to PDF.