Convert a PDF to text

No. The text is read by your browser, on your device, with pdf.js, a PDF library downloaded from this site when you choose the file. The only thing we are told is that a run happened — not the file, its name or its text.

Because its pages are pictures: a scan, or photos of pages saved as a PDF. There are no letters in the file to take out, only pixels, and reading them needs OCR (text recognition), which this page does not do. A PDF made from a document on a computer has a text layer and works here.

Lines come out in reading order, top to bottom and left to right, and a table's columns are kept apart by tabs, so a row pastes into a spreadsheet as cells. A page set in two columns side by side is read across both columns, line by line; to pull a table out as a spreadsheet, use PDF to Excel.

Some PDFs store each letter as a shape without saying which letter it is — common with older Hindi and other Indian-language fonts, and with some scanned-and-edited files. The text that comes out is then whatever the file claims, which can be nonsense; OCR on the page's picture is the way round it.

Not until it is unlocked: a PDF with a password, or one whose owner has locked copying its text, is refused with a sentence saying so. Otherwise one PDF at a time, up to 50 MB and 300 pages.