3 Free Ways to Extract Text from PDF on Windows and Mac (2024)

There are instances when we need to extract text from a PDF file for various reasons like data extractions, editing, and content quoting within a PDF.

Don’t know how to extract text from a PDF? No matter if you want to extract text from image-based scanned PDFs or text-based PDFs, you can find the solutions in this article.

👉To save time, you can directly get PDFgear, the free and powerful PDF editor that allows you to directly copy text from PDF or convert scanned PDF into editable text.

Quick Answer

Extract Text From PDF Image Using OCR

With PDFgear, extracting text from scanned PDFs is easy, and it’s free to use. You can even use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to edit your scanned PDF or copy text from a PDF image using the text extractor tools, into editable documents like Excel and Word.

Moreover, you also get to convert PDF to editable documents like Word.

Moreover, the OCR feature supports multiple languages, recognizing over 100+ global languages.

Step 1. Open your image-based PDF

PDFgear is compatible with both MacOS and Windows operating systems. Simply click the button below to get PDFgear on your device for free.

Launch PDFgear and go to the main interface, then click the Open File button. This will take you to the file explorer where you can select the PDF document you want to edit.

Step 2. Extract text from an image PDF

Click the “OCR” button on the “Home” tab, hold down the left mouse button, and drag to select the area you want to extract text from.

Then, click the “Done” button in the small right corner. Thanks to the high-end OCR feature, you will be able to extract text accurately without losing any formatting.

Step 3. Copy or save the extracted text

A window will pop up to show you the extracted text, and you can choose to copy the text to the clipboard to successfully complete the process of extracting the text.

Alternatively, click the ‘Save’ button to save the extracted text as a TXT document.

Copy Text from a PDF for Free

If you want to extract text from a text-based PDF file, it’s much simpler. As a professional PDF editing software, PDFgear allows users to directly select and copy text within the PDF.

You can effortlessly replace, add, delete, and format text in a PDF file, just like you would in a Microsoft Word document.

Step 1. Open the PDF file in PDFgear

To begin, download and install PDFgear. Then, open the PDF files you want to extract text from by clicking the “Open files” button.

Step 2. Extract Text from PDF

After opening the file, go to the “Edit” tab, and click on the “Edit Text” icon.

Select the text you want to extract, then press Ctrl+C on the keyboard to copy the selected content to the clipboard. Now you can paste the extracted text into Notepad or any other program.

Converting Uneditable PDF to Word

You can also extract text from a PDF file by converting it into an editable Word file. When converting a scanned PDF to Word for text extraction, there are two important things to keep in mind: accuracy and formatting. To ensure successful and precise text extraction, you need reliable OCR technology for converting scanned PDFs to Word.

With PDFgear, you can convert any type of PDF file to Word without formatting loss.

Step 1: Add your scanned PDFs

Open PDFgear PDF editor on your computer. Choose the “PDF to Word” option from the Hot Tools; this will open the converter window.

Click on the “Add File” button and select the scanned PDF document that you want to convert. PDFgear provides a batch conversion function, so you can choose to import multiple PDF documents at one time.

Step 2: Customize the conversion settings

Set any other conversion preferences, such as page range or OCR language.

Do check the OCR button; then, PDFgear will analyze the images in the scanned PDF and convert the text within them into selectable and editable text.

Step 3: Batch convert scanned PDF to Word

Click on the “Convert” button to start the conversion process. Wait for the conversion to complete. This may take some time, depending on the size of the PDF file.

Once the conversion is finished, the Word document will be generated. Then you can extract any text from the document.

FAQs

What Is the Free Tool to Extract Text and Image From a PDF?

PDFgear is the best free PDF text extraction tool. It uses OCR technology to extract text from even the most complex PDFs, and its easy-to-use interface ensures that users can quickly and easily extract the text they need.

How to Extract Text From PDF Using Acrobat?

To extract text from a PDF in Acrobat, choose Tools > Export PDF. Then choose to export the PDF to a Word format or rich text format.

How to Extract Text From a PDF to Word?

To extract text from PDF to Word, follow the 3 simple ways in this post to extract the text from PDFs first, then you can choose to copy the extracted text from PDF to Word.

How Do I Convert a PDF to Text Online?

Upload your PDF to PDFgear’s PDF to Text converter, and the conversion process will automatically start. After it’s done, you can download the converted file.

Conclusion

PDFgear PDF editor makes extracting text from PDFs a piece of cake. By following the three methods provided in this guide, you can confidently extract text from PDFs and unlock the full potential of your documents without any cost.