PDF to text

Sometimes the layout is the thing in the way

You do not want the document to look right. You want to find a sentence in it, or quote a clause, or push the contents into something that only eats text.

Extract the textRuns in your browser

Plain text is the format with nothing in it: no fonts, no columns, no page breaks, no images. That sounds like loss until the moment you need to search sixty documents for one phrase, and then it is the only format that behaves.

What it is good for

Finding something

Text files are searchable by every tool on every system, including the ones from before PDFs existed.

Quoting accurately

Copying from a PDF viewer often brings along line breaks and hyphens from the layout. Extracted text is cleaner to work from.

Feeding another system

Anything that processes language wants words, not a page description.

What you give up

Everything visual. Tables arrive as rows of words with the grid gone, images disappear entirely, and a two-column page may interleave if the reading order was ambiguous. That is the trade, and it is the right one only when the words are the point.