Extract text from PDF: copy and search content

Extract text from a PDF: copy everything at once

1 min read·25 July 2026

Want to pull all text from a PDF to edit, translate, or search? PDFrust's PDF-to-text tool extracts the complete text in one go.

When do you use text extraction?

You want to search a PDF contract for keywords, copy text from a report to Word or a spreadsheet, or make a summary of a long document. Text extraction gives you the raw text without formatting.

Extract text in PDFrust

Open the PDF-to-text tool on PDFrust. Upload your PDF. PDFrust extracts all text from all pages and displays it as plain text. Copy the text or download as a .txt file.

PDF to text

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Scanned PDFs: use OCR

Is your PDF a scan (image of text rather than actual text)? Then text extraction is not enough — use the OCR tool to recognise text. After OCR the text is searchable and copyable.

Limitations

Text extraction works well for text-based PDFs but loses formatting (tables, columns). Preserving layout requires specialised conversion software. PDFrust focuses on simple text export.