Extract text from PDFs and scans. Export to Word or TXT.
Yes. When a PDF has no text layer (common for scans), this tool automatically switches to OCR — you don't need to figure that out yourself or go find a different tool. That step is slower than plain extraction (it recognizes page by page) and less accurate than direct extraction, so proofread anything important.
Besides scanned PDFs, there's another common cause: the PDF was saved with its text converted to curves/vector shapes (common in PDFs exported from design software — certificates, posters, forms). This is usually done so the document looks the same even if the reader's computer doesn't have the right font installed, but the trade-off is that the PDF no longer contains any information about which character each shape represents — just lines and fills. In this case, not just this tool but any tool, including Adobe Acrobat, will fail to select that text with the mouse — it's not a software limitation, the PDF itself simply no longer contains the text data. The good news is this tool's OCR fallback kicks in either way — OCR reads the page visually, so it doesn't matter whether the cause was a scan or converted-to-curves text.
Only basic line breaks are kept — font, size, color, and table structure aren't preserved. This tool is built for pulling out the text content, not turning a PDF into an editable Word document. If you need full formatting preserved for editing, use a dedicated PDF-to-Word tool instead.
No. Text extraction runs entirely in your browser — the PDF's content is never sent to any server, and nothing is kept once you close the page.