Get the text out of a PDF to copy, translate or analyze it. The result is a plain .txt file, organized page by page, that opens anywhere.
How it works
- Select the PDF.
- Click “Extract text”.
- Download the resulting .txt file.
Frequently asked questions
Why is the file empty?
The PDF is probably a scan: it contains images of text, not text. Run it through the “OCR PDF” tool first to recognize the text, then run the extraction again.
Is the layout preserved?
Only the text is extracted, line by line, with a marker at the start of each page. Columns, tables and images aren’t reproduced.
Do accents display correctly?
Yes, the file is saved in UTF-8, the encoding recognized by today’s text editors.
Which software opens the .txt file?
Any text editor: Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac, or a notes app on your phone. You can also open it in Word or Google Docs.
Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
First remove the protection with the “Unlock PDF” tool if you know the password, then start the extraction.
Is it free?
Yes, with no sign-up and no usage limits.
Does my document stay confidential?
Yes, extraction happens entirely in your browser: the PDF isn’t sent to any server.
What the text file contains
PDFRoll reads the text on each page and saves it in a UTF-8 encoded .txt file, so accents and special characters stay intact. The PDF’s line breaks are kept, and each page starts with a “--- Page 1 ---”, “--- Page 2 ---” marker, and so on, so you know where each passage comes from.
Only the text is kept: no images, no formatting, no columns. That’s exactly what makes the file small and easy to reuse.
When should you extract text from a PDF?
- Copy long passages from a document that’s hard to select.
- Paste the content into a translator, a proofreading tool or an analysis tool.
- Search for a word across several documents with a simple text editor.
- Archive a document’s content in a form any software can read.
The file opens in Windows Notepad, TextEdit on Mac, or any text editor on a computer or phone. Extraction happens in your browser, without uploading the document.
Scanned PDF: why the file is empty
As the tool’s note says, extraction works on PDFs that contain real text, not on scans. A scanned or photographed document is just a series of page images: PDFRoll then warns you that no text was found. Run the file through the “OCR PDF” tool first, which recognizes the text on your device, then run the extraction again.
Need to keep the structure?
If you want to keep headings, lists and bold text, go with “PDF to Markdown”. For an editable document with its paragraphs and tables, use “PDF to Word”. To get back a table of figures, “PDF to Excel” puts the data back into columns. And to get straight to the key points of a long text, try “Summarize a PDF”.