When you need the text, not the pages
A PDF is built to keep pages looking the same everywhere. That is great for reading and printing, and awkward when you want to reuse the words. You may need to quote a paragraph in an email, move a report into a document you can edit, search a long file for a name, or feed the text to another program. In all these cases you want plain text, without the page around it.
First, check that the PDF has real text
Not every PDF holds text. A PDF made from Word, Google Docs or a web page keeps the letters as text, and you can select them. A PDF made by scanning paper, or by taking photos of pages, holds only pictures of the words. To a computer that is the same as a photo of a wall.
There is a quick test. Open the PDF and try to select a sentence with your cursor, or press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for a word you can see. If the words highlight, the PDF has text and the methods below will work. If nothing highlights, it is a scan, and you will need a tool that reads pictures (see the last section).
Option 1: Select and copy in your PDF viewer
For a paragraph or a page, this is the fastest way. Select the text, copy it and paste it where you need it. It stops being practical when you want a whole document, because selecting across many pages is slow and easy to get wrong.
Option 2: Extract the text with Velfile
To take the text from many pages in one go, use PDF to Text.
- Open PDF to Text and choose your PDF. The limit is 100 MB.
- Leave Pages to read empty for the whole file, or type a range such as 1-3, 5 to read only those pages.
- Press Extract text. The text appears in a box below.
- Press Copy text, or Download .txt to save it as a plain text file.
The work happens in your browser, on your own device. The PDF is not uploaded to a server, which matters for contracts, reports and anything private. The tool reads up to 200 pages in one run, so for a longer file, read it one range at a time. When you read several pages, each one starts with a line such as Page 2, so you can tell where it came from.
What to expect from the result
You get the words, in the order the PDF stores them. You do not get the design. A few things are worth knowing.
- The layout is gone. Fonts, colors, columns and tables are not kept. A table usually comes out as plain lines of text.
- Pictures are not included. Only text is taken. To save the pages as pictures instead, use PDF to JPG.
- Headers and footers come along. A page number or a document title that repeats on every page is repeated in the text too.
- Reading order can be off. In a document with several columns or boxes, the text can come out in a different order from the one you read in.
Clean up the text afterwards
Extracted text often needs a few minutes of tidying before you use it.
- Join broken lines. PDFs end each line where the page ends, so a paragraph can arrive split into short lines. Paste it into Word or Google Docs and use find and replace to join them.
- Remove repeated headers and page numbers. Search for the repeated phrase and delete it.
- Fix hyphens. A word split across two lines at the page edge can keep its hyphen. Search for a hyphen followed by a line break.
- Read the numbers. Check names, amounts and dates against the PDF before you rely on them.
Common problems
- The result is empty. The PDF is almost certainly a scan or a photo. It has no text inside, so there is nothing to extract.
- The file could not be read. It may be protected by a password, or damaged. A PDF locked with a password cannot be read, so remove the password first.
- Some letters look strange. A few PDFs store their text in a way that does not map back to normal letters, for example with special fonts. In that case copying from the PDF viewer will often give the same strange result.
- You only need part of the file. Type a page range, or cut those pages out first with Split PDF.
If the PDF is a scan
A scanned PDF needs OCR, which stands for optical character recognition. It is software that looks at the picture of a page and works out the letters. PDF to Text does not do OCR, because it reads the text a PDF already contains. Several free services can do it, and Google Drive can often open a scanned PDF with Google Docs and read the letters for you. Check the result carefully, since OCR makes mistakes with blurry scans, handwriting and small print.
A clear scan makes a big difference. If you are starting from paper, our guide on scanning a document with your phone shows how to get a sharp, straight page.
What to do next
If you pasted the text into Word and edited it, you can turn it back into a PDF with Word to PDF. To join the result with other files, use Merge PDF.
Last updated: 21 October 2026