Loona PDF to Text Online - Free
Copying text out of a PDF by hand is slow and messy. This extractor reads the text layer of your document page by page and gives you clean, reusable text - for notes, quotations, editing or translation.
How to extract text from a PDF
- Choose the PDF you want to extract text from.
- Click "Extract Text" and wait a moment while each page is read.
- Copy the text from the box, or download it as a .txt file.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why is some text missing or jumbled?
The tool reads the PDF's built-in text layer. Scanned PDFs are pictures of text and have no text layer - those need OCR, and some PDFs store text in unusual reading orders.
Can I edit the extracted text?
Yes. The result appears in an editable text box before you copy or download it.
Is there a page limit?
No fixed limit - long documents simply take a little longer to process on your device.
Are my documents uploaded?
No. Extraction runs 100% in your browser.
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How it works
Most PDFs created from Word, Excel or a web page carry a hidden text layer - the actual characters stored alongside the page layout. This tool opens the file locally with PDF.js, reads that text layer page by page, and groups the stored fragments back into lines by their vertical position on the page. The result is assembled with a --- Page N --- marker before each page and placed in the editable text box, ready to copy or download as a plain .txt file. There is no OCR (picture-reading) step: the tool can only return text the file itself contains, and it all happens in your browser - your document is never uploaded.
Worked example
A student downloads a 12-page set of lecture notes as a PDF and wants the definitions in her own document. She runs the file through the tool, and the box fills with all 12 pages, each under its own --- Page N --- heading. She deletes the pages she does not need, tidies a heading or two, copies the rest into her assignment - and also saves the full extraction as extracted-text.txt for later.
Frequently asked questions
My PDF is a scan and the result came back empty - why?
A scanned PDF is a photograph of pages: it looks like text to us, but the file contains no text layer for the tool to read. Scans need OCR software, which recognises letters in the picture. This tool deliberately does only the faithful, exact job of reading a real text layer.
How are the pages separated in the output?
Each page begins with a line reading --- Page 1 ---, --- Page 2 --- and so on, in the original order, so you can always tell which page any paragraph came from.
Does it keep tables and multi-column layouts?
Only partly. Lines are rebuilt in the order and position the text is stored in the file, so simple documents read naturally. In multi-column pages or complex tables the stored order may interleave, and you may need a quick tidy-up in the editing box before copying.
What exactly do I download?
A single plain-text file called extracted-text.txt containing everything in the box - including any edits you made. Plain text has no fonts or formatting, so it pastes cleanly into Word, email or notes apps.
I only need the text from a few pages - can I pick them?
There is no page selector; the tool extracts every page. The quick workflow is to extract all, then delete the unwanted --- Page N --- sections in the box before copying or downloading.
Does it work for languages other than English?
Yes, for any language whose characters are stored in the PDF's text layer, the characters are extracted as stored. Note that reading order follows the file's internal order, which some right-to-left documents store in visual rather than reading sequence.