How to extract text from a PDF on Mac
A paragraph onto the clipboard, a region of a page, or the whole document as text.
Sometimes you do not want the document, you want what it says. There are three ways to get it, and which one to use depends on how much you need.
A passage: select and copy
Drag across the text and copy it (⌘+C). This is the right answer for a sentence or a paragraph and needs nothing beyond reading, which is free.
A region of a page: Extract Text
Extract Text is part of Premium, so it carries a small lock in the document actions panel and in the menu bar. The lock is a label rather than a barrier — you can open the feature and see what it does before deciding to unlock it. Reading and every page operation stay free.
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Open Extract Text
From the document actions panel on the right, under Content.
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Drag out the region
Around the part of the page you want — a column, a block, a table cell, the address at the top of a letter.
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Take the result
The text from that region goes onto your clipboard, ready to paste anywhere.
This is better than selecting by dragging when the page has columns. Selecting across a two-column page picks up both columns interleaved; drawing a box around one column gets you that column.
The whole document: export as text
Exporting to plain text gives you the words with no formatting at all — right for quoting, archiving, feeding into something else, or searching with other tools. Exporting to Rich Text keeps basic formatting, which is a better starting point if a human is going to read the result.
| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| A sentence or a paragraph | Select and copy |
| One column of a multi-column page | Extract Text over that region |
| The words of the whole document, unformatted | Export as plain text |
| The whole document with basic formatting | Export as Rich Text |
| Something you will keep editing as a document | Export to Word |
| Tabular data for a spreadsheet | Export to Excel |
If selecting does nothing, the page is a picture and there is nothing to copy. Run Make Searchable over the document first; after that all three methods work.
What extracted text loses
Text is text. Columns, tables, headers, footnotes and reading order are layout, and layout does not survive the trip into plain text. Extraction reads a page in the order the document stores it, which is usually but not always the order a human would read it — footnotes and side panels are the common surprises.
For anything where the structure matters, exporting to Word or Excel keeps more of it than plain text does.
Frequently asked questions
How do I copy text from a PDF on a Mac?
Drag across it and press ⌘+C. For one column of a multi-column page, use Extract Text and draw a box around just that column.
How do I get all the text out of a PDF?
Export it as plain text for the words alone, or as Rich Text to keep basic formatting.
Why can I not copy text from my PDF?
It is a scan, so there is no text in it. Run Make Searchable over it first.
Why does copying from a two-column PDF give me jumbled text?
Because selecting by dragging crosses both columns. Extract Text over a region gets you one column cleanly.
Does extracted text keep the formatting?
Plain text keeps none of it; Rich Text keeps the basics. For structure, export to Word or Excel instead.