Copy all text from PDF to a text file

1 min read·25 July 2026

Want to copy all text from a PDF for use in a document, AI tool, or database? PDFrust's pdf2text tool extracts every word and exports it as a readable .txt file without any formatting.

When to extract text

Paste content into another document or CMS. Analyse a PDF with an AI summarisation tool or language model. Extract data into databases or spreadsheets. Make content searchable without OCR. Create translations from the exported text.

How to extract text with PDFrust

Upload your PDF to the pdf2text tool. It extracts all selectable text from all pages and saves it as a .txt file. Formatting (headings, bold, columns) is lost — you get the pure text content.

PDF to text

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Scanned PDFs need OCR first

Scanned PDFs without OCR contain no selectable text — pdf2text returns an empty or near-empty file. Apply OCR first using the OCR tool to make text recognisable, then extraction works correctly.

Extract text from a specific page

To extract text from only a specific page, use the split tool to isolate that page as a separate PDF file, then run pdf2text on that single-page file. This gives you full control over which sections you extract.