How accurate is text extraction?

Very accurate for text-based PDFs (typed, not scanned). Scanned PDFs need OCR — this tool doesn't do OCR.

What about multi-column layouts?

Reading order is inferred from the PDF's content stream. Usually correct; complex layouts (magazines, newspapers) may need manual reordering.

No — output is plain text. For structure-preserving extraction use PDF-to-Markdown (not yet in this suite) or a tool like pdftohtml.

Tables become text with spaces as column separators. For tabular extraction, look at CSV-based PDF tools (Tabula, Camelot).

Extract plain text content from a PDF document. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the PDF collection.

Works best on PDFs created from Word, LaTeX, or browsers — scanned PDFs return no text
Pages are separated in the output by '---' markers
DRM-protected PDFs cannot be extracted

PDF text is stored as strings with positional hints — not as paragraphs, which is why extracted text often needs reflowing.
Every PDF font can remap characters via a CMap, so the same glyph may encode different Unicode values in different PDFs.
Scanned PDFs contain no text at all — only images — which is why OCR engines like Tesseract exist to recover text from pixels.

How accurate is text extraction?: Very accurate for text-based PDFs (typed, not scanned). Scanned PDFs need OCR — this tool doesn't do OCR.
What about multi-column layouts?: Reading order is inferred from the PDF's content stream. Usually correct; complex layouts (magazines, newspapers) may need manual reordering.
Are formatting and images preserved?: No — output is plain text. For structure-preserving extraction use PDF-to-Markdown (not yet in this suite) or a tool like pdftohtml.
Does it handle tables?: Tables become text with spaces as column separators. For tabular extraction, look at CSV-based PDF tools (Tabula, Camelot).

Extract plain text content from a PDF document. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the PDF collection.

Works best on PDFs created from Word, LaTeX, or browsers — scanned PDFs return no text
Pages are separated in the output by '---' markers
DRM-protected PDFs cannot be extracted

PDF text is stored as strings with positional hints — not as paragraphs, which is why extracted text often needs reflowing.
Every PDF font can remap characters via a CMap, so the same glyph may encode different Unicode values in different PDFs.
Scanned PDFs contain no text at all — only images — which is why OCR engines like Tesseract exist to recover text from pixels.

How accurate is text extraction?: Very accurate for text-based PDFs (typed, not scanned). Scanned PDFs need OCR — this tool doesn't do OCR.
What about multi-column layouts?: Reading order is inferred from the PDF's content stream. Usually correct; complex layouts (magazines, newspapers) may need manual reordering.
Are formatting and images preserved?: No — output is plain text. For structure-preserving extraction use PDF-to-Markdown (not yet in this suite) or a tool like pdftohtml.
Does it handle tables?: Tables become text with spaces as column separators. For tabular extraction, look at CSV-based PDF tools (Tabula, Camelot).