# How to copy text out of a PDF (and why it sometimes comes out empty)

> Sometimes copying from a PDF works perfectly. Sometimes you get nothing, or one long line of words in a strange order. Here's why, and what to do about it.

Whether you can get text out of a PDF depends on how the PDF was made. Open it, try to select a single word with your mouse, and you'll know which situation you're in.

## Case 1: you can select words

The PDF contains real text. [PDF to text](https://pdfjade.com/pdf-to-text) reads it page by page and gives you a plain `.txt` file, plus a box you can copy from. Tick *Mark page breaks* if you need to know where each page starts, which is handy when quoting a document.

## Case 2: you can't select anything

The PDF is a scan or a photo. What looks like text is a picture of text, exactly like a photo of a newspaper. Text extraction returns nothing because there's nothing to extract.

You need OCR (optical character recognition) to turn the picture back into characters. Run the file through [OCR PDF](https://pdfjade.com/ocr-pdf) first: it recognises the words on each page and adds them as an invisible layer. After that, the PDF behaves like a normal one, and PDF to text can extract it. Expect a few mistakes on blurry or crooked scans; check names and numbers before relying on them.

For a single paragraph, phones are quicker: on an iPhone, press and hold on text in a photo (Live Text); on Android, Google Lens does the same.

## Case 3: text comes out, but jumbled

A PDF stores each piece of text with its position on the page, not as flowing paragraphs. To rebuild reading order, the extractor groups pieces into lines and sorts them top to bottom. That works well for normal pages and less well for:

- **Two-column layouts**, where lines from both columns can be interleaved.
- **Tables**, which come out as rows of values without the grid.
- **Text set at an angle** or along a curve.

For a short passage, selecting and copying directly in a viewer often gives the cleanest result, because you choose the region. For the whole document, extract everything and tidy up in a text editor.

## Odd characters

If you get boxes, question marks or ligatures like "fi" instead of "fi", the PDF uses a font without a proper character map. Search-and-replace fixes ligatures quickly; missing characters usually can't be recovered without OCR.

## Questions

### Can it extract text from a scanned PDF?

Not directly, because a scan contains only images. Make it searchable with OCR PDF first, then extract the text.

### Is formatting kept?

No. The result is plain text: no bold, no fonts, no tables. That's what makes it easy to paste anywhere.

Source: https://pdfjade.com/guides/copy-text-from-a-pdf