How to extract or copy text from a PDF

Do you want to use the text from a PDF in another document? It is easy, as long as the PDF contains real text and is not a scan.

When does this work?

PDF files created from Word, Excel or another application usually contain real text that you can select and copy. Scanned PDFs are images of text, and without OCR software you cannot select anything.

How do you extract the text?

Upload your PDF and PDFrust automatically extracts all text from all pages. You get a preview and can download the text as a .txt file, which you can then open in Word, Notepad or another program.

What if no text is found?

Then it is probably a scanned PDF. The pages are stored as images in that case. You need OCR software to convert them to text.

Is the formatting correct?

The text is read out as stored in the PDF file. Columns, tables and special formatting are lost when exporting to plain text. For Word documents with formatting, other tools are needed.