Extract Text from PDF
Extract every line of text from PDF documents for use in other applications. Export as plain text for simple copying, Markdown with page structure preserved, or detailed JSON containing word positions, fonts, and form field values. Scanned, image-only pages are automatically detected and run through on-device OCR, so you get text even from documents that have none embedded. Perfect for content migration, text analysis, accessibility, and data extraction workflows.
What does this tool do?
The Extract Text tool pulls text content from PDF documents in three useful formats. Plain text output provides clean, copy-pasteable text without formatting. Markdown format preserves page structure with headings and basic formatting cues. JSON format provides detailed extraction including word-level bounding boxes, font information, font sizes, and AcroForm field values for advanced processing and data extraction needs. When a page contains no embedded text (a scan or photo), the tool falls back to optical character recognition automatically — all in your browser.
How it works
Using MuPDF's text extraction capabilities, the tool analyzes the PDF's content streams to identify text elements. It maps glyph data to Unicode characters, extracts positioning information, and identifies font properties. For the JSON output, it provides per-page arrays of text blocks with bounding box coordinates, enabling precise text location identification. Form fields are detected through AcroForm analysis, with widget names, types, and current values extracted and included in the output. For image-only pages, the tool rasterizes the page, cleans it up on the GPU (grayscale, adaptive thresholding, deskew), and recognizes the text with an on-device OCR engine selected to match your hardware — lightweight Tesseract on modest devices and a WebGPU-accelerated neural model on capable ones.
Features
- Three output formats: plain text, Markdown, structured JSON
- JSON includes per-word bounding boxes, font names, and font sizes
- Captures AcroForm field names, types, and current values
- Page-level breakdown in all formats
- Live preview before downloading
- Handles multi-column and complex layouts
- Preserves text reading order
How to use
- 1
Upload your PDF
Drag a text-based PDF (not a pure image scan) onto the drop zone. The tool analyzes the document and prepares extraction.
- 2
Choose output format
Select Plain text for copy-paste simplicity, Markdown for structured text with page headings, or JSON for programmatic processing with position data.
- 3
Review the preview
The preview panel shows a sample of the extracted text. Review to ensure the extraction captured text correctly.
- 4
Download the text file
Click Extract to generate the output file. Download the .txt, .md, or .json file depending on your selected format.
Common use cases
Migrate content to web platforms
Extract text from PDF reports, whitepapers, or documentation for republishing on websites or content management systems.
Data extraction from forms
Use JSON output to programmatically extract values from filled PDF forms for database import or record processing.
Text analysis and NLP processing
Extract text for natural language processing, sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, or machine learning training data preparation.
Accessibility text alternatives
Extract text from PDFs to create accessible HTML versions or screen-reader-friendly content for users with disabilities.
Tips & best practices
- Plain text works best for simple documents with single-column layouts
- Markdown format helps preserve document structure when converting to web content
- JSON output is ideal for developers building automated text extraction pipelines
- Scanned, image-only pages are OCR'd automatically — no separate step needed
- OCR accuracy is best on clean, high-resolution scans; very low-resolution or skewed pages may need a better source