PDF Text

What it's for

Copy the text out of a PDF, in the order you’d read it, as plain text or as Markdown, without sending the file anywhere. Useful when selecting text in a PDF reader gives you broken lines and stray page numbers, or when you want a document’s words for a notes app, a search or a word count.

For example, to quote a report in your own notes, choose the PDF, pick Markdown, and paste the result in.

How to use it

Choose, drop or paste a PDF; it is read at once and the text appears below. Changing a setting redoes the result without reading the file again.

• Format: plain text, or Markdown, where lines set in a larger size than the rest of the page become headings (# for the largest) and bullet characters become list items.
• Pages: leave blank for all, or list pages and ranges such as 1-3, 7.
• Join the lines of a paragraph: puts each paragraph on one line. A line ending in a hyphen keeps it, with no space after it, so “exam-“ and “ple” become “exam-ple”.
• Mark where each page starts: adds a line such as [Page 2] before each page.

Copy puts the text on the clipboard; Save as a file downloads a .txt or .md file.

Example

Choose a PDF with a title and a few paragraphs, pick Markdown and leave the rest as it is. The title comes out as a line starting # , and each paragraph as one line, with a blank line between them.

Good to know

Only text that is in the file is found. A scanned page is a picture, so it gives [No text on page n]; use the Image to Text (OCR) tool for it. Reading order is a guess from the positions on the page: text in columns is read column by column only when there is a clear gap between them, so tables, sidebars and other layouts can come out in the wrong order or run together, and the same goes for text in an unusual layout. Paragraphs and headings are judged from spacing and size, so check them. Pictures and tables as such are not kept, and a PDF with a password can’t be opened.