Extract text from PDF
Reads the document's text layer and writes it out as a plain text file, with a marker between pages so you can still tell where each one started. Useful for quoting, searching, diffing or feeding a document into something else.
Drop a file here, or click to choose
One PDF — you get a .txt file
Pulls out the text layer, page by page. A scanned PDF has no text layer, so it will come back empty — that needs OCR, which Quill does not do yet.
The document is parsed locally, one page at a time.
Text runs are read in the order the file stores them and joined into lines using the document's own line breaks.
If the file comes back empty, the PDF has no text layer — it is a scan, and the words are pixels rather than characters.
A plain UTF-8 text file, with a --- Page n --- marker before each page.
A PDF stores text in whatever sequence it was drawn, which is usually reading order but need not be. Multi-column layouts, sidebars and tables can come out interleaved, because the format records positions rather than structure.
Extraction can only return characters the file actually contains. A photographed or scanned page contains an image, so there is nothing to extract. Turning that into text requires optical character recognition, which Quill does not currently do.
The output is plain text: no columns, no tables, no fonts, no positioning. That is the point — it is for feeding the words somewhere else, not for reproducing the document.
A calm, fast PDF workspace. Free to use, private by default.
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