PDF Extraction

How to Extract Text or Images from a PDF File

📅 April 4, 2026 ⏱ 5 min read ✍️ BuildPDF Team

PDF files are great for sharing finished documents — but what happens when you need to get the content out of a PDF? Maybe you want to copy text from a scanned report, or pull out individual page images from a multi-page PDF. BuildPDF supports both modes of PDF extraction, entirely in your browser.

Two Ways to Extract PDF Content

Text Mode

Extract as Plain Text (.txt)

BuildPDF uses PDF.js to read your PDF's text layer and exports all readable text as a clean .txt file. Best for PDFs with selectable text (not scans).

Image Mode

Extract as Images (.zip of JPGs)

Each page of your PDF is rendered as a high-resolution JPG image and packaged into a .zip file for download. Works with any PDF, including scanned documents.

Step-by-Step: Extract Content from a PDF

Go to BuildPDF

Open buildpdf.co in your browser.

Upload your PDF

Drag and drop your .pdf file onto the converter, or click "Choose Files." BuildPDF automatically detects that it's a PDF and switches to extraction mode.

Choose your output format

In the options panel, select either "Plain Text (.txt)" to extract the text layer, or "ZIP of Images (JPG)" to render each page as an image.

Click "Extract PDF" and download

The extraction runs in your browser. Download the .txt file or .zip archive when complete.

Which Mode Should I Use?

Use Text Extraction if:

Your PDF was created digitally (e.g., exported from Word, Google Docs, or a web browser "Print to PDF")
You can already select and highlight text when you open the PDF in a viewer
You need to copy, edit, or search the text content
You want a small file size output

Use Image Extraction if:

Your PDF is a scanned document (photos of physical pages)
You cannot select text in the PDF — it's "flat" content
You want to post individual pages as images on a website or social media
You need to view or share each page separately
The PDF contains charts, diagrams, or visual content you want as image files

⚠️ Scanned PDFs and OCR: BuildPDF can render the pages of a scanned PDF as images, but it cannot automatically perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract text from scanned pages. For OCR, consider Adobe Acrobat or Google Drive (which offers free built-in OCR when you upload a PDF and open it with Google Docs).

What Gets Extracted?

Text extraction

BuildPDF extracts all text content from the PDF's text layer, page by page, separated by page markers. Mathematical symbols, special characters, and most Unicode text are supported. Table structure may not be perfectly preserved — the output is a sequential plain-text approximation.

Image extraction

Each page is rendered at screen resolution to a JPG image. For a 10-page PDF, you'll receive a ZIP file containing 10 images named page-1.jpg, page-2.jpg, etc. Image quality is high by default.

💡 Tip: Need individual page images at print resolution? For best results, ensure the original PDF was created at 150 DPI or higher. Screen-resolution PDFs will produce lower-quality page images.

Privacy & Security

Your PDF file is processed entirely within your browser using PDF.js, Mozilla's open-source PDF rendering engine. The file is never uploaded to any server. This makes BuildPDF safe for extracting sensitive content from confidential PDFs like contracts, financial statements, or medical records.

Extract content from your PDF now

Free, private, instant. No uploads, no sign-up.

Try PDF Extractor →