Extract the text of a PDF to .txt

What this tool does

• One page marker in the file you get: “page 12” is what people write in an email, and it has to be findable.
• Pages without text are named as such, not left blank: a silent page is information, not a gap.
• The sentence at the top says whether the extraction found anything: “none of the 12 pages carries extractable text”.
• The file comes out as plain text, with no clock: two extractions of the same document give the same file, bit for bit.
• The document is not modified: this tool reads it.

What it does not do: We return the text as the document carries it: words hyphenated at the end of a line stay hyphenated, columns are not untangled, tables are not rebuilt as tables. Guessing at those things means being wrong in silence. A scanned page carries no text at all, and the extraction says so rather than handing you an empty file. "Make a scan searchable" reads it and lays the recognised text on it; extraction then works on the document you get, without dropping it in again.

Nothing is uploaded. Cut your network connection once this page has loaded: the tool keeps working. How to check it yourself.

The other tools

• Merge PDFs: Several files, one document, in the order you decide.
• Organize pages: Reorder, rotate, delete, duplicate: the whole plan.
• Extract pages: Pick pages, take them out into a document of their own.
• Delete pages: Remove pages while looking at them; they are not left under the file you get.