Instant text — or an honest "this is a scan"
If your PDF has a text layer — anything exported from Word, a browser, LaTeX or an invoicing system — the text is extracted in moments, previewed right on the page, and ready to copy to the clipboard or download as .txt. No server round-trip, no size anxiety: after a one-time ~5 MB engine download, everything runs on your device.
And when a PDF has no text layer, this tool does the honest thing: it tells you the file is a scan that needs OCR (text recognition) instead of handing you a zero-byte .txt and calling it success. Mixed documents get per-page honesty too — if pages 4 and 7 are scans inside an otherwise digital file, the result says exactly that.
Frequently asked questions
Why does it say my PDF is a scan?
Because it has no text layer — the pages are photographs of text, and there is nothing to extract. That needs OCR (text recognition), which is a different job. An honest message beats an empty .txt file.
Does it keep the formatting?
It extracts plain text in reading order — headings, tables and layout become simple lines. If you want the structure preserved, PDF to Markdown is the tool for that.
Some pages are missing from the output — why?
The status line lists exactly which pages are scans without a text layer. The rest of the document extracts normally; the scanned pages would need OCR first.