Copy the words out of a document when selecting them by hand is painful, all of it at once, page by page.
Drop it on the box above or pick it from your files.
It appears in one box, with a marker where each page starts if you want one.
Copy the lot to your clipboard, or save it as a plain text file.
A PDF made from a document, exported from a word processor, printed to PDF, generated by a system, carries the real words inside it, and they come straight out.
A PDF made by scanning or photographing paper carries a picture of the words instead. Nothing here can copy those, because as far as the file is concerned there is no text on the page, only ink.
For scans, Image to text provides English OCR from images or PDFs and exports plain text. It does not create a searchable PDF. Check recognised names and numbers against the original.
No. The work happens inside this tab, on your own machine. Open your browser's network tab while you use the tool, there is no request carrying your file.
Practical limits depend on the tool, browser and available device memory. Large files can fail even when no explicit limit is shown. Keep an original and use a smaller job if this device cannot finish it.
No, and there is no daily limit either. There is nothing to sign up for.
It is a scan, a picture of a page rather than a page. There is no text in it to take.
No. You get the words in reading order, not the columns, tables and spacing around them.
This reads the text that is already stored inside the PDF. It does not do text recognition, so a scanned document, which is only pictures, gives back nothing and the tool says so. For scans, use Image to text, which reads the words from the picture.
The text comes out in the order the PDF stores it, with line breaks where the PDF marks them. Columns, tables and sidebars are not laid out again, so a two column article can interleave, and a table becomes a run of values.
Leave Mark where each page starts switched on if you want to know where a quote came from, and switch it off for clean text to paste elsewhere. You can copy everything at once or save a .txt file, and the character count tells you how much there is.
For a table, paste the text into a spreadsheet and tidy it there. A PDF that needs a password to open must be unlocked first.