Extract all text content from a PDF file instantly
Built & maintained by Pappu Venkata Subbi Reddy, founder of Clacify
Clacify's PDF to Text tool extracts all readable text from a PDF file and displays it as plain text you can copy, search, and use anywhere. Works on text-based PDFs (where text is embedded as actual characters). Useful for copying text from PDFs that have selection disabled, extracting content for analysis, converting old PDF reports to editable text, and processing PDFs programmatically. Note: scanned PDFs (image-only) require OCR to extract text.
Upload the PDF to Clacify's PDF to Text tool. If the PDF contains embedded text (not a scanned image), all text is extracted and displayed as plain text — copy and paste from there. If the PDF is a scanned image, the text extraction will be empty because the 'text' is actually a picture of text, which requires OCR processing.
A text PDF contains embedded digital text — you can select and copy it in a PDF viewer. A scanned PDF is a photo or scan of a physical document stored as an image inside the PDF — there is no selectable text, only pixels. PDF to Text extraction works on text PDFs; scanned PDFs require OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to read the text from the image.