How to convert a PDF to text
- Add your PDF. Drop it onto the box above, or tap to choose a file.
- Pick the pages. Keep All pages, or tap Choose pages and type the pages you want, for example 1-3, 5 or 8-.
- Mark page breaks if you need them. Switch on Mark where each page starts to add a line like ----- Page 3 ----- before each page.
- Press Extract text. A progress bar shows which page is being read.
- Copy or save it. Use Copy to paste the text elsewhere, or Download .txt to save it as a UTF-8 text file.
Features
- Readable output. Words are put back into lines, and a blank line is added where the spacing on the page shows a new paragraph and between pages.
- Two-column pages are read column by column instead of mixing the two columns line by line. Headings that run across both columns stay in place.
- Tables stay separated. Wide gaps inside a line become tabs, so rows paste cleanly into a spreadsheet.
- Page ranges, including open-ended ranges such as 8- for "page 8 to the end".
- Optional page markers, which you can switch on or off after extracting without reading the file again.
- Counts at a glance. The number of characters, words and pages is shown above the text.
- Scanned-page detection. Pages without a text layer are listed by number, so you know which ones need OCR.
- Right-to-left support for Urdu, Arabic, Persian and Hebrew text.
Why use Fileora to get text from a PDF
Copying text straight out of a PDF viewer is fiddly. Selections jump between columns, line breaks land in the middle of sentences, and on a phone it's often impossible to select more than a paragraph. Extracting the whole document at once gives you clean text to quote, translate, search, summarise or reuse.
Fileora reads the PDF in your browser, so contracts, bank statements and exam papers never leave your device. There's no sign-up, no watermark and no page limit, and the tool works the same on a phone as on a laptop. Once you have the text, paste it into the word counter to check its length and reading time.
When the text doesn't come out
A PDF can look like text on screen but hold only pictures. Phone scans, faxes and photocopies saved as PDF are like this. When no page has any text, the tool says so; when only some pages are scans, it names them. To read scanned pages, convert them with PDF to JPG and then run the images through Image to Text (OCR).
If you are asked for a password, the PDF is encrypted. Open it with Unlock PDF using the password you know, then try again.
A few PDFs use fonts without a proper character map. Their text looks right on screen but extracts as odd symbols or not at all. There is no reliable way to recover those characters from the file itself, so OCR is the answer here too.
What to expect from the output
The result is plain text, so bold, italics, colours, links and images are not included. Headers, footers and page numbers are part of the page text, so they appear in the output as well. Words split with a hyphen at the end of a line stay split. Very complex layouts, such as magazine pages with text boxes and captions scattered around photos, may come out in an unexpected order, because the reading order is rebuilt from where the words sit on the page.