Convert PDF to Text Online Free: Extract Raw Text From Any Document
I had a research project last year that involved analyzing language patterns from 14 industry reports. Each report was a 20-60 page long PDF document, and the task was to identify common phrases, analyze trends across years, and compare approaches taken by different companies. This would have been impossible without being able to search through all 14 reports at once, or to paste any text from the PDF reports into my analytics tools.
Converting all 14 PDF reports to text took around 10 minutes. After that, doing the analysis I needed became significantly faster and easier because I was working with a more familiar text-based environment rather than dealing with PDFs.
This research project was an enlightening experience for me in regards to the power of being able to extract plain text from PDFs as a preprocessing step for any content that I need to work with that is contained in PDFs.
Why Plain Text Extraction is More Useful Than It Might First Appear
Converting PDFs to text is one step removed from the original content, and is less pretty to look at than the source material. It might seem counterintuitive to do such a conversion, but this task unlocks a multitude of options for working with the contents of PDFs. There are several reasons why you might want to extract plain text from PDFs:
Use text analysis, sentiment analysis, and keyword identification tools on the content found within PDF documents
Make the contents of PDFs accessible to natural language processing models or other AI-based tools
Copy large sections of text from PDFs with less hassle than standard copy operations allow
Use text excerpts from PDFs in other documents as-is with minimal hassle
Extract text from PDFs for publishing or other downstream processing, such as creating blog posts or social media content from reports
Make PDF content searchable and indexable within a database or CMS
Work with multiple PDFs at once, to compare their contents programmatically
Have you ever tried using a PDF to Word converter, only to end up with a disorganized mess of a Word document in the end? Plain text is similar to Word in that it represents another way to take structure out of a PDF. In some cases it even preferable to using a Word converter.
How I Extract Text From PDFs, Without Having to Copy Every Line by Hand
Anyone who has tried to copy text from a PDF displayed in a browser knows how painful it can be to attempt to extract large portions of text in this manner. Line wrapping breaks up sentences, columns braid together in unpredictable ways, hyphens get split between lines while the remainder of the word stays on the next line, and overall what winds up in your text editor is barely intelligible. For a small sample this is forgivable, but for anything larger than a couple pages it becomes an exercise in frustration to attempt to copy text this way.
Here is the method that I use to extract text from PDFs, that doesn’t involve tediously copying line by line in a PDF reader:
Open an online PDF to text converter
Upload the PDF that has the text content I want to extract
Extract the text from the PDF
Download the newly extracted text content as a text file
The PDF to text converter I used (ConvertersOnline) does not involve signing up for an account, and simply extracts the text content from PDFs to text files that can then be opened in any text editor or other text-based tool.
By comparing this method to the line-by-line copying method, it becomes apparent that the automated method does a far better job of preserving the integrity of the source text.
Knowing What to Expect From Text Extraction Tools
It’s important to know what to expect and not expect from text extraction tools, because it informs you on what you can and cannot do with text that has been extracted from PDFs
Text-Based PDFs Extract Cleanly
PDFs created using text-based programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, graphic design programs, etc.) will extract cleanly as paragraphs of text, with little further processing needed beyond removing any unwanted header/footer content that might have been extracted alongside the body text.
Tables Convert to Linear Data
Tables that are implemented as text-based tables within PDFs are comprised of rows and columns of information. When these PDFs are converted to text, the rows and columns are linearized into a long list of information. If you need to extract tables from PDFs, it’s best to use a PDF to Excel converter, as that’s another structured format that can represent tables.
Scanned PDFs Require OCR Processing
PDFs that are generated by scanning hardcopies of text are comprised of images of the text. As such, these cannot be processed by standard PDF to text converters, and require OCR software to extract text from them.
Formatting Vanishes During Conversion
As the name suggests, plain text contains no formatting. If you are looking to retain formatting from PDFs, consider using a PDF to Word converter instead.
Common Text Extraction Mistakes
These are mistakes that I see commonly enough that it’s worth calling them out.
Trying to extract text from scanned PDFs with a text extraction tool
While scanned PDFs appear similar to standard PDFs at first glance, they behave completely differently when it comes to text extraction. If your text extraction tool gives you blank text or text that is almost entirely made of numbers, you’re likely dealing with a scanned PDF.
Using a PDF to text converter without doing any clean-up processing on the extracted text before using it elsewhere
Some text extraction tools do some light cleaning up of extracted text, such as removing extra spaces and line breaks inserted by the page pagination system. Even so, some header/footer content might still appear throughout the text, along with other undesirable artifacts. It’s always a good idea to do a quick clean-up pass to remove any unwanted text fragments.
Using PDF to text conversion when PDF to Word conversion would have been more appropriate
PDF to text conversion strips out any formatting that was present in the PDF. If you need to retain that formatting, it makes more sense to use PDF to Word conversion, as both Word and PDF are word processor formats.
Trying to extract text from a PDF with a password on it, without first unlocking the PDF
Most text extraction tools are completely useless on PDFs with passwords on them. Unlocking a PDF is the first step that needs to happen before text extraction can occur.
Is It Safe to Convert PDFs With Sensitive Data to Plain Text Online?
This is an important consideration for any PDF that has sensitive information in it. It’s not only important if the PDF has financial information in it, personal information about anybody, research, or any other data that you wouldn’t want randomly floating around on a server somewhere for anybody to find. Any trustworthy text extraction tool should be able to tell you the following:
Have temporary file storage for file processing that is purged upon file download
Not require you to make an account just to extract text from a PDF
Have a privacy policy outlining any additional privacy concerns, including whether or not processing your PDF entails storing or using any of your data
Have a policy of not retaining, using, or distributing any extracted text in any way other than making it available for you to download
For PDFs that do contain sensitive text content, it’s important to do your due diligence in regards to the text extraction tool that you use. The same goes for any other conversion tool you use, as reliable tools will have a privacy policy that addresses their stance on sensitive data.
Things I’ve Learned From Extracting Text From PDFs
Based on my experience of extracting text from dozens of PDFs in the past, here are some things that I’ve learned.
For research projects that involve text analysis, make sure to extract and store all PDF text files before doing any analysis rather than doing text extraction on individual PDFs as you go
The reason for doing this is to streamline the workflow, since having access to all text files at once facilitates easier search/query operations
Before using any other text processing tool or AI language model, make sure to remove recurring header/footer text fragments that tend to show up on each page of a PDF
This is largely for convenience, since it prevents such text elements from being erroneously processed as actual text content
For very long PDFs, the text file extracted from them will be large, but it will open almost instantaneously in any text editor
This is often faster than trying to open such a large PDF file in a viewer program directly
If you need to remove certain pages from a PDF before doing any text extraction from it, make sure to use a Delete PDF pages tool before using a text extraction tool
The reason for doing this is straightforward – only the pages you need are extracted, saving you from having to deal with the hassle of having to remove unnecessary content after extraction
I had this idea to improve my research process, and started extracting text from every PDF I used for research even before needing the plain text versions of them. This small change allowed me to do quicker research document reviews, by being able to perform simple search operations within the text files rather than trying to do them in the PDF reader, which took more time and effort to set up for every research project I worked on
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between PDF to text and PDF to Word conversion?
PDF to text is generally raw text extraction without any additional formatting, whereas PDF to Word conversion retains the original formatting of the PDF and outputs it as an editable Word document.
Can I extract text from a scanned PDF?
Scanned PDFs are images of the original text, which means you cannot extract text from them directly. You will need to use an OCR tool to extract text from scanned PDFs.
Do I need any software to convert PDF to text?
A browser-based PDF to text extractor is all you need to do this conversion without any additional software.
Will the extracted text preserve the reading order of the original document?
It depends on the source PDF. Most text extraction tools will preserve reading order for single column text, but text in multiple columns may extract in column order, rather than reading order.
Can I extract text from a specific page rather than the whole PDF?
It depends on the tool, but some allow you to specify the page range for the PDF to text extraction process. If your text extractor tool does not allow you to do this, you can always use a Split PDF tool to extract only the pages you need before doing any text extraction.
What happens to images and tables in the PDF when I convert to text?
Images are not processed by a text extractor since they contain no textual information, whereas tables convert to linear data records.
Can I convert a password-protected PDF to text?
Password protected PDFs will need to be unlocked before any conversion process is initiated.
Final Thoughts
PDF to Text conversion is one of those tools that most people are unaware of until they need it, and then wonder how they got by without it. Once you realize the power of being able to do batch-scale operations on PDF content, it becomes a part of a larger workflow that involves working with both PDFs and other content types. Any research project that involves analyzing text from PDFs will become significantly easier with this type of conversion, and it will save you both time and headache in the long run. If you are a developer working with PDF content at scale, this type of conversion is invaluable. This is also true if you are working to repurpose content from PDFs into other media, or simply want to copy text from a PDF without having to go through the hassle or drudgery of manual copy operations.
Have you ever had to manually perform text copy operations from a multi-page PDF, because you didn’t know about tools that can automate this process?
Internal Links Used:
PDF to Word tool → https://convertersonline.com/tool/pdf-to-word
PDF to Text tool → https://converterson_line/text/texttool/
PDF to Excel tool → https://convertersonline.com/tool/pdf-to-excel
Unlock PDF tool → https://convertersonline.com/tool/unlock-pdf
Delete PDF pages tool → https://convertersonline.com/tool/delete-pages-from-pdf
Split PDF tool → https://convertersonline.com/tool/split-pdf