discreetpdf.com

Extract text from a PDF

Drop a PDF, get the text content as a .txt file. Near-instant for digital PDFs.

Files are processed entirely in your browser. Your file's contents never leave your device.

Your PDF never touches a server. There's nothing here to ration.

No daily caps. No spinner that turns into a paywall after the third file.

Private by architecture

Your PDF never leaves your device.

Unlimited use

No daily caps or hourly throttling.

No signup, no watermarks

Every tool below works with or without an account.

Works offline

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About this tool

Pulling the text out of a PDF is for grepping through a long report, quoting into a notes app, feeding a document to a translator, or counting words for billing. Every text run from every page lands in one .txt file, with blank lines between pages to keep a rough sense of structure.

What you get is the document's logical text, the same thing a screen reader would announce, not a copy of the layout. Two-column papers come out as one sequential stream. Tables flatten. Lists keep their items but lose the bullets. For search, citation, and summarizing, that's usually exactly what you want anyway.

Scanned PDFs come back empty, because an image-only file has no text layer to read. Run those through an OCR tool first, then extract. Everything else, Word exports, InDesign output, web-to-PDF, extracts in a blink, since pdf.js reads the embedded text layer directly instead of rendering anything.

Frequently asked questions

Why is the extracted text empty?
The PDF is almost certainly image-only, a scan with no text layer. The reader shows you a picture of a page, and there's no text in a picture. OCR it first to add a text layer, then extraction will work.
Does it preserve the layout of multi-column or tabular content?
No. Output is a flat stream in reading order, so columns and table cells come out as consecutive lines. If you need the formatting kept, converting to .docx is a better route.
Are line breaks and paragraphs preserved?
Line breaks are approximated from pdf.js's end-of-line markers. True paragraph breaks aren't stored in PDFs at all, so blank lines between pages serve as rough dividers. Within a page, digital PDFs usually come out reading naturally.
How fast is the extraction?
Near-instant for digital PDFs, since nothing has to render. A 200-page document usually takes a second or two.
Does the text stay in my browser?
Yes. pdf.js does the extraction locally and the .txt is generated right in the browser. Neither the PDF nor its text goes anywhere.

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