PDF to Text

How to copy the text out of a PDF

1. Choose the PDF (or drop it on the box). Its text comes out at once, in the order you would read it.
2. Choose Markdown (headings, lists, bold and tables kept) or Plain text (just the words). To take only some pages, choose Some pages and type them, such as 2-4.
3. Copy it, download it as a .md or .txt file, share it, or open it in the Markdown Viewer to read it as a page or turn it into a PDF or Word.

Everything happens in your browser: the PDF is never uploaded to ap7am or anywhere else. A statement and its password stay in your browser, and neither is saved. You can change the text in the box before you copy or save it.

Only the parts you need

Under What to convert, choose Only the parts I select. Tick a table under Tables found (a table that goes on over several pages is listed once), or draw a box over each part you want, on any page (on a phone, tap ✏︎ Draw a box first). Only the text inside the boxes comes out, in the order of their numbers; Mark where each part starts puts a line before each. A box drawn mostly over a table fits itself to the table, and Same place on next pages copies a box to the pages where its table goes on. A ₹ drawn with a font of its own, as some banks' statements do, comes out as ₹.

A box moves and resizes with the mouse or a finger, or from the keyboard: the arrow keys move it, Alt and the arrow keys resize it, Delete removes it, and Ctrl+Z undoes. × removes a box, and the list under the page jumps to each part. A word only partly inside a box is taken when most of it is inside; a word is never cut in half.

What it keeps

• Reading order: a page in two or three columns is read column by column, with a title across the columns first; a paragraph that goes on in the next column or on the next page is joined again.
• Paragraphs: lines are joined into paragraphs, and a word broken with a hyphen at the end of a line is joined again (infor-mation becomes information). A line kept short on purpose, as in an address, stays a line of its own.
• Headings by their size, and by bold type where the PDF names its fonts: the largest become #, the next ## and ###.
• Lists with bullets or numbers, the lines under each item joined to it.
• Tables whose columns line up, as Markdown tables (in plain text, cells apart by tabs).
• Headers, footers and page numbers that repeat at the top or foot of the pages are left out; tick Keep page headers, footers and page numbers to keep them. Mark where each page starts puts a line such as --- Page 2 --- between pages.

What it cannot do

• Scanned PDFs: a scan or a photo of a page is a picture, with no text inside to take out. The tool says which pages have none. Run it through OCR PDF first: it reads the Telugu and English in pictures.
• Old Telugu fonts: Telugu typed in Anu and similar fonts is stored as Latin letters, so it comes out looking like ¯ÁÁ…¬ìê. The tool spots it and says so: paste that text into Anu to Unicode to turn it into Telugu.
• Telugu in Unicode comes out as the PDF gives it. Some PDFs give back a space inside a word or a vowel sign in the wrong place; the tool counts such places and tells you, so you can check those words.
• Pictures, and text drawn as shapes (as in some logos), are not text: they are left out.

Markdown or plain text?

Questions

Made with Mozilla's pdf.js (Apache 2.0 licence), running in your browser.