The confusion is common: people look for an "OCR" when the text is already there. Character recognition is for scanned documents and stays approximate; on a native PDF it would degrade text that was already perfect.
How it works
Drop your file on the page, or click to pick it from your folders.
Start the job. It runs inside your browser: nothing is sent to a server.
Download the result. No account, no watermark, no queue.
When this really helps
Quote a passage
Copy an exact sentence without retyping it.
Analyse a document
Feed the text to a spreadsheet, a script or a proofreader.
Archive in plain text
Keep a searchable, lightweight version of a file.
What the conversion keeps, and what it loses
Working inside a browser comes with limits a hosted service does not have. Here they are in plain words, so you know what to expect before you start.
What is kept
- The exact text, character for character
- Reading order and line breaks
- The separation between pages
- All accents and punctuation
What is not carried over
- Layout, columns and tables
- Images and logos
- Fonts, sizes and colours
- Hyperlinks
Worth knowing about the format
Extraction relies on pdf.js, which reports the position of every fragment. Fragments sharing a baseline are grouped, which avoids getting one word per line. For a scanned document, use the character recognition tool instead.
Not the right tool?
- Scanned PDF to text — Si le PDF est un scan, c'est la reconnaissance qu'il vous faut.
- PDF → Word — Pour garder les titres et les tailles plutôt que du texte nu.
- Summarise a PDF — Pour n'en garder que l'essentiel.
Why it's free
Online converters receive your file on their servers, process it, then promise to delete it. Every document costs them computing time: that is why they charge, and why they cap file sizes.
Here, the work happens on your own computer. The page contains no server code: your document cannot be received, because it is never sent. So there is nothing to bill, nothing to cap, and nothing to delete afterwards. Cut your connection once the page has loaded — everything keeps working.
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from OCR?
Here the text already exists inside the file: it is read out, exactly and instantly. Recognition guesses letters from an image — useful on a scan, pointless and degrading on a native PDF.
Why is my result empty?
Because your PDF is an image. The tool says so explicitly and points you to character recognition.
Is the layout preserved?
No, this is plain text. Columns end up one after the other. To keep the structure, convert to Word instead.
Other tools
Edit the text in a PDF — Fix a line that is already written, even on a scanned document. This is the feature other services charge for, and the natural starting point when you need to retouch before converting.