PDFForge

Guide

Extract text from a PDF

If the PDF was exported from a writer, the words are in the file and this page reads them. A photo of a page has no text layer, so the result is empty. That is not a failure of the reader.

Scanned pages with no text layer will come back empty. That is not OCR.

Not OCR

We do not look at pixels and guess letters. Scans need a different product.

Column order

Runs are sorted top to bottom, then left to right. A two-column layout can interleave.

What you download

A text file of those runs. It expires with the other results, about 30 minutes.

Related

All guides

FAQ

Why is the file empty?

The PDF is probably a scan. There is no text layer to read.

Can I extract one page range?

Yes. Set the range on the tool.