How to Extract Text from a PDF
Copy text from PDFs, export to Word, and what to do when the PDF is a scan with no real text.
Whether you can get text out of a PDF depends on one question: is the text real, or is the page a picture of text?
Test it
Open the PDF and try to select a sentence with your mouse. If it highlights, the text is real. If you drag a box over the whole page, it is an image.
If the text is real
- Copy and paste small sections directly.
- For the whole document, PDF to Word extracts everything into a .docx with paragraphs separated and page breaks kept.
If the page is an image
You need OCR (optical character recognition), which reads the letters from the picture. Many phone scanning apps and desktop programs include OCR. PDF to Word does not do OCR and will tell you no text was found.
Why pasted text looks odd
PDFs store lines of text individually, so pasting can bring unwanted line breaks. Paste into a plain text editor and remove the breaks, or use the Word export, which joins lines into paragraphs.
Tables
Tables are the hardest part. Text comes out in reading order, not in a grid. For important tables, copy them cell by cell or use a spreadsheet tool with table detection.