Pdf To Text Converter

Last updated March 22, 2026

How PDF Text Extraction Works

PDF files store text as a series of text objects with font references and positioning commands. Text extraction reads these objects and reconstructs the reading order. This works well for digitally-created PDFs (Word exports, web-generated PDFs). Scanned PDFs contain only images — text extraction requires OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to work.

PDF Text Object Structure

BT                    % Begin text
  /F1 12 Tf           % Font F1, size 12
  100 700 Td          % Move to position (100, 700)
  (Hello, World!) Tj  % Show text string
ET                    % End text

Using PDF.js for Browser Extraction

import * as pdfjsLib from 'pdfjs-dist';

async function extractText(pdfFile) {
  const arrayBuffer = await pdfFile.arrayBuffer();
  const pdf = await pdfjsLib.getDocument({ data: arrayBuffer }).promise;
  let fullText = '';

  for (let i = 1; i <= pdf.numPages; i++) {
    const page    = await pdf.getPage(i);
    const content = await page.getTextContent();
    const pageText = content.items
      .map(item => item.str)
      .join(' ');
    fullText += `--- Page ${i} ---
${pageText}

`;
  }
  return fullText;
}

Extraction Limitations

• Scanned PDFs: No embedded text — requires OCR (Tesseract, AWS Textract, Google Vision).
• Column layouts: Multi-column PDFs may have text extracted in the wrong reading order.
• Tables: Table cell boundaries are not preserved — text may run together.
• Ligatures: Some fonts use ligatures (fi, fl) that may not extract as separate characters.
• Encrypted PDFs: Password-protected PDFs cannot be extracted without the password.