Get the text out of a PDF
Reads the file’s real text layer and hands it to you. If a page is a photograph of words, you’re told that — not handed an empty string as if the page were blank.
Loads the PDF text engine (≈0.5 MB, from this site) on first use.
All the tools
The empty-page lie, refused
A scanned page has no text layer — it is pixels. Text extraction on such a page yields nothing, and there are two ways to report that: silently emit an empty string and let you conclude the page was blank, or say "this page is a scan; there is no text here to read — recognition is a different job." This tool does the second, per page, and points you at OCR for the pages that need it.
What you get
Plain text, per page, in reading order as the file encodes it. (A PDF's internal text order occasionally differs from visual order — columns are the classic case. The text you get is what the file actually says, which is also what search engines and screen readers see.)
Questions people actually ask
- Why did my PDF produce no text?
- Almost certainly it is a scan — photographs of pages, with no text layer inside. The tool tells you which pages are scans instead of returning silence; run those pages through OCR if you need their text.
- Does this work on scanned documents?
- Not by itself — a scan has no text to extract. OCR (its own page here) recognizes printed text in scans first.
- Is my file uploaded?
- No — the text is read in your browser.
We invite you to double-check our work
Open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and run any tool on this page and nothing leaves your device.
The whole source is on GitHub. Read it.
Found a bug, or a claim that doesn’t hold up? Tell us: pdf@geodeforge.com. An example file turns a guess into a quick fix — and if yours is too sensitive to share, we understand; a description still helps.
That’s the difference between a privacy policy and a fact.
This slot pays for the page
One static, labeled sponsor link — an image we host and a plain link. No ad network, no tracking script, no third-party request. That is the entire business model, and it is why nothing above has a price.
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GeodeForge is a one-person studio that crafts open-source tools that do what they say, and let you check — in your browser.