Can I extract text from a scanned PDF?
No. A scanned PDF is essentially an image (it has no real text layer, just something that looks like text) — reading text out of an image requires OCR, which this tool doesn't support. You can convert it to images first, then run a dedicated OCR tool on those.
Why can't I extract text that's clearly visible on the page?
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.
Does the extracted text keep the original formatting?
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.
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
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.