Extract Text from PDF — Copy Everything Free
Copy all the text from a PDF into a .txt file in one click, with support for Thai and other languages.
Get a whole document's text in one file instead of copying page by page, in Thai or any other language stored as real text.
How to extract text from a PDF (3 steps)
- Open your PDF.
- Click to extract the text.
- Download the .txt file or copy the text.
What you get and what to do with it
A plain .txt file with every page's text in sequence, separated by a marker line with the page number so you know where each part came from. It is saved as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, so it opens correctly in Notepad, Word, Excel or Google Docs without garbled characters.
- Paste into an email or chat — faster than selecting text page by page.
- Search a long document — press Ctrl+F in the .txt file and see every match.
- Count words or check spelling — paste into Word and use its tools.
- Feed it to a program or AI — plain text is many times smaller.
- Archive it — a .txt file will still open twenty years from now.
How it differs from PDF to Word
- Extract text (this tool) — plain text, no formatting, tiny and very fast. Suits reusing, searching or copying.
- PDF to Word — keeps headings, bold, images and paragraphs; larger and slower because images are extracted. Suits editing in the original layout.
Why some files give odd results
- The file is a scanned image — there's no text to extract, and the tool will point you to OCR.
- Words run together or split wrongly — PDFs store spaces as gaps between letters, not as characters, so spaces must be guessed. Unusual column layouts can confuse this.
- Vowel or tone marks come out wrong — some PDF creators embed Thai fonts with marks stored separately from the consonants. Common cases are handled, but some fonts still cause problems.
- Symbols instead of letters — the font uses a private encoding: it looks right on screen but holds no real character codes. Convert the pages to images and run OCR.
- Columns out of order — in two-column documents, left and right may be swapped on some lines.
Common uses
- Sharing the text of a notice or official letter — no retyping.
- Summarising course handouts — paste into your notes app and edit.
- Copying line items from a quotation or invoice — paste into a spreadsheet, or use a PDF to Excel tool for a ready-made table.
- Finding where certain words or names appear — faster than paging through the PDF.
Keeping your text private
Contracts, reports and internal papers stay private: the text file is built entirely on your device, and the text is not sent anywhere, stored, or used to train any system.
FAQ
Can I extract text from a scanned PDF?
A scan is an image, so use the free OCR tool instead.
Will Thai text come out garbled?
Not for PDFs created by software, because the text comes from the real character data in the file.
Can I extract only some pages?
Split out the pages you need with the split tool first, then extract.
The .txt file shows garbled characters in Excel. What should I do?
The file is UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, which recent Excel versions open correctly. If not, import it via Data, From Text, and choose UTF-8.
I want a table, not running text. What should I use?
A PDF to Excel tool, which detects columns and places data into cells. This tool gives plain text only.
Why do some lines break mid-sentence?
PDFs store text as the lines shown on the page, not as paragraphs. To join them, use find and replace in a text editor.