How To Copy Text from a PDF

Typically, to copy from a PDF, you highlight, right-click, and copy as you normally would with any digital document. However, this doesn’t work every time, as some PDFs are scans, and some are protected from editing. Rather than purchasing software just to unlock the protection or an expensive OCR solution, you can simply use Smallpdf to extract text from your PDF for free.

Afterward, you can freely select and copy the text as needed. If you need to edit the copied content, choose Microsoft Word as the output option from the three available formats. After the conversion process is done, content copying will be available regardless of whether the original PDF was protected or scanned.

How Do I Copy Text From a PDF to Word?

As stated above, by converting the PDF document to another format, you’ll transfer all the text and other content types, i.e., images and tables, into an editable text document. Depending on your requirements and the PDF document’s original format, choose Word, PPT, or Excel as the output format. Once you’ve done this, you can select the text as you would with any ordinary file.

If you want the final result to be a PDF file, all you have to do is choose this format at the end of the conversion process. You can either do this within Microsoft Word (by using the Save As feature) or use our Word to PDF converter to get the job done.

Can I Copy Text From Multiple PDFs at Once?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is currently not enabled on Smallpdf for batch processing. Still, a quick fix would be to first merge the PDF files into one document and then proceed to the conversion. Doing so would allow you to extract mass text from your PDFs into one large file within your text editor.

A complete list of all Smallpdf’s functionalities will appear as soon as you hover your cursor over and select “Tools” in the tool page header. There you’ll also find a tool called Edit PDF. This is the crème de la crème of PDF tools, as it allows you to add annotations, text, as well as various shapes and images to your document.

What Happens to My Files?

We process just north of a million documents every single day. Our popularity has grown thanks to the various security measures we have deployed to maintain a safe infrastructure for our users. Secure, military-grade TLS encryption will protect your documents every step of the way: during uploads, transfers, and downloads. We also delete files after one hour of processing. You can convert as many files as you’d like back and forth between file formats.

Also, if you decide to open the PDF with our offline tool, your file will never leave your local drive. Every conversion, compression, or edit will be done right then and there, so you don’t have to worry about uploads. It can’t get any more secure than that!