You need the raw words from a PDF — for a translator, a content analysis script, or to paste into a different tool. No formatting, no images, just text.
Live-text PDFs cough up text easily. Scanned PDFs need OCR first. The tools differ slightly.
For live-text PDFs
Open the PDF in any reader. Cmd/Ctrl+A to select all, copy, paste into a text editor. Done.
For more controlled extraction, use Flint's PDF to Word converter and save the Word doc as plain text. Useful when you want to preserve paragraph breaks.
For scanned PDFs
Select-all returns nothing because there's no text layer. Run OCR first. After OCR, the text becomes selectable.
OCR quality varies. Clean scans: 90-95% accurate. Messy scans: 70-85%. Always spot-check the output.
For PDFs with mixed content
Some PDFs mix live text and scanned images. The live text extracts cleanly; the scanned bits need OCR. Run OCR on the whole document to normalise it.
Result: one extraction pass gets everything.
FAQ
Will formatting come along?
Plain text is just words. Formatting is lost. Use PDF to Word for formatted output.
What about column layouts?
Most extractors read left-to-right within columns and top-to-bottom across columns. Multi-column PDFs sometimes need cleanup.
Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
Unlock first, then extract. The password is required.
Are tables extracted as text or structure?
Plain text extraction flattens tables to text. For structured output, use PDF to Excel.
Text extraction is the start of so many other workflows. Use Flint's PDF to Word converter for clean output, OCR first if it's a scan.