Which tool do you need?
| If you… | Use |
|---|---|
| You want the words, in reading order | PDF Text Extractor |
| You want a table as CSV, with its columns intact | PDF Table Extractor |
| You want to know who made the file, when, and whether it is scanned | PDF Metadata Extractor |
Text and tables are genuinely different extractions. Plain text discards column structure, so anything you intend to calculate with should come out as a table; anything you intend to read should come out as text.
Check for a text layer before anything else
One property decides whether any of this works: whether the PDF has a text layer. A document exported from a word processor, an accounting system or a browser's print dialog contains real characters, and extraction from it is exact. A document that came off a scanner or a phone camera contains a photograph of a page and no characters at all — every text tool will return nothing.
The quickest test is to try selecting a line of text in a PDF reader. If a selection rectangle appears instead of highlighted words, there is no text layer. The PDF metadata extractor answers the same question directly by sampling several pages, which is worth doing first when a document is misbehaving — it tells you in seconds whether to keep going or switch to OCR.
For a scanned PDF the route is image to text OCR: export the pages as images, recognise them, and work from the result.
Every pdf extraction tool
- PDF Table Extractor — Stop retyping data trapped in PDFs. Drop in a file and convert its tables to clean CSV you can open in Excel or Google Sheets — right in your browser.
- PDF Text Extractor — Get all the text out of a PDF in reading order — as paragraphs or exact lines — then copy it or download it as a .txt file.
- PDF Metadata Extractor — See who made a PDF, when, with what software, what its pages measure, and whether it has a text layer or is just scanned images.
- PDF Image Extractor — Pull every embedded picture out of a PDF at its stored resolution and save it as PNG — no screenshotting, no quality loss from cropping.
- PDF Page Splitter — Break a multi-page PDF into individual single-page PDFs and download each one — no uploading, no loss of page quality.
- PDF Page Extractor — Keep just the PDF pages you want, or remove the ones you don't, and download a single new PDF. Real page copies, nothing uploaded.
- PDF Form Field Extractor — Pull the name, value and type of every field out of a filled PDF form and export to CSV or JSON. Nothing is uploaded.
- PDF Repair — Fix a PDF that shows garbled text or fails to extract. Re-saves without non-standard compression — works in your browser, nothing uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
Why did my PDF return no text?
It has no text layer — the pages are images. Confirm with the PDF metadata extractor, then use OCR instead.
Should I use the text extractor or the table extractor?
Use the table extractor when the columns carry meaning and you want CSV. Use the text extractor when you want the words and the layout does not matter.
Are my PDFs uploaded?
No. All three tools parse the document with PDF.js inside your browser. Nothing is transmitted, which matters for contracts, statements and medical records.