How to Extract Text from a PDF

PDF text extraction reads the text content stream stored inside the PDF file and outputs it as plain text. When a PDF is created from a Word document, exported from a spreadsheet, or generated by a website, the text is usually embedded as machine-readable characters that can be extracted directly. The process is fast, accurate, and runs entirely in your browser.

How to extract text from a PDF step by step

What types of PDF work well

Text extraction works best on digitally-created PDFs — documents that were never printed and scanned. These include:

• PDFs exported from Microsoft Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer
• Reports exported from spreadsheet or accounting software
• Web pages saved as PDF (using browser Print › Save as PDF)
• PDFs generated by code (invoice systems, banking portals, reporting tools)
• Email attachments from automated systems

These PDFs contain a text content stream with the actual characters, font mappings, and Unicode values needed for extraction. The result is usually clean and accurate.

Limitations: what the extractor cannot do

Plain text extraction has a few important limitations:

• No layout preservation — columns, tables, headers, and footnotes are extracted in internal storage order, not visual reading order. Multi-column documents may come out with columns interleaved.
• No formatting — font, size, bold, italic, colour, and spacing are all stripped. You get raw content, not a styled document.
• Garbled text from unusual fonts — some PDFs use embedded fonts with custom glyph mappings and no Unicode encoding. Extraction produces incorrect characters or symbols instead of readable text. This is a PDF encoding issue, not a tool limitation.
• Tables lose structure — a table in a PDF may extract as a series of numbers and labels with no visual relationship between them. A dedicated PDF-to-Word converter preserves table structure better.

For single-column text-heavy documents — reports, articles, contracts — extraction quality is usually excellent.

What to do with scanned PDFs

A scanned PDF is a collection of page images. There is no text stream inside — only pixel data. A text extractor will return an empty result or garbage characters because there is nothing to extract.

The solution is OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which analyses the image of each page and converts the recognised letter shapes into actual text characters. FixMyPDF includes an OCR PDF tool (Pro tier) that uses Tesseract.js to process scanned documents entirely in your browser.

You can tell whether your PDF is scanned by trying to select text in your PDF viewer. If you cannot highlight any text, it is a scanned (image-only) PDF and needs OCR before text extraction will work.

Privacy: why this matters for text extraction

Text is more sensitive than images. A PDF of your payslip, tax return, or employment contract contains highly specific data that should not leave your device. Most online text extraction tools upload the entire PDF to a server, extract the text on their infrastructure, and return it to you.

FixMyPDF uses PDF.js — Mozilla’s open-source PDF rendering engine — running entirely in your browser. The text extraction happens locally: the PDF is parsed in your browser tab and the text is output directly. No bytes of your document travel over the network.

Frequently asked questions