Extract all text from any PDF — whether it's a digital document or a scanned image. Download as TXT or get a searchable PDF in seconds.
Works on both digital and scanned PDFs. No software to install, no account required. Just upload and download your text.
Extract Text Now →Free · No signup · Files deleted after 2 hours
Digital PDFs already contain real text data. PDFTash extracts it instantly with no OCR needed — results in under a second regardless of page count.
For image-based scanned PDFs, OCR is automatically activated using Tesseract and ocrmypdf. Supports 10+ languages for accurate extraction of non-Latin scripts.
Download as a plain TXT file for easy editing, copying and translation — or as a searchable PDF that retains the original layout with a hidden text layer.
Once text is extracted, the possibilities are wide open.
Go to the PDFTash OCR PDF tool at pdftash.com/ocr-pdf. Upload your PDF — either drag and drop or click to browse. For scanned PDFs, select your document's language from the dropdown (English is the default). Click the extract button and wait a few seconds. Then download your extracted text as a TXT file or as a searchable PDF. The entire process takes under a minute for most documents.
Yes. PDFTash automatically handles both types of PDFs. Digital PDFs (created in Word, Google Docs, or any PDF software) contain real text and are processed instantly. Scanned PDFs (photographed, faxed, or physically printed and scanned) contain only images — PDFTash automatically applies OCR using Tesseract and ocrmypdf to extract the text from each page image. Select the correct language for scanned PDFs to ensure highest accuracy.
It depends on the type of protection. PDFs can have two types of passwords: an owner password (restricts editing, copying, or printing but allows opening) and a user password (required to open the file at all). If the PDF has only an owner/permissions password, PDFTash can often still extract the text. If the PDF requires a password just to open, you will need to unlock it first using a PDF unlocking tool before uploading to PDFTash.
There is no page limit — PDFTash processes every page in your document. The only restriction for free users is a 10MB file size limit. Since scanned PDFs can be very large (each page is a high-resolution image), you may need to compress your scan first if it exceeds 10MB. Pro users at $2/month can upload files up to 200MB with no other restrictions.
Yes. After extracting text from your PDF, use the PDFTash Translate PDF tool to translate the entire document into another language. Supported languages include English, French, Spanish, German, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, and Portuguese. The translate tool also auto-runs OCR on scanned PDFs, so you can go directly from scanned PDF to translated text in one step.