Extract text from a PDF without uploading it
Contracts, reports and letters often contain things you would rather not hand to a website. PataPage reads the text out of your PDF right in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and you can use it as often as you like.
How to copy text from a PDF
Drop your PDF and the text appears in a box a few moments later. Read through it, press Copy to put it on your clipboard, or press Download to save a .txt file named after your PDF. Tick Add page markers if you want a line like “Page 3” before each page, which is useful for long documents.
The counter above the box tells you how many words and pages were found, so you can check at a glance that nothing is missing.
When there is no text to extract
A PDF made from a scanner or a phone camera is really a set of pictures. It looks like text, but there are no letters inside to copy. In that case PataPage tells you no text was found. Reading text from pictures needs a different technique, called OCR, and PataPage does not do that yet.
If you can click into a PDF in your viewer and select words, this tool will work. If you can only select a whole page as one block, it is a scan.
Good to know
Text comes out in reading order, line by line, but complicated layouts such as tables and multiple columns can come out in a different order from how they look. Formatting, images and fonts are not kept, because a .txt file holds plain text only. Need the pages as pictures instead? Try PDF to JPG. Need to cut a long document down first? Split PDF can pull out just the pages you need.