Does this OCR scanned pages?

No. It reads text that is already in the PDF. A photographed or scanned page with no real text layer will come out empty or nearly empty.

Will columns and tables stay lined up?

Turn on “Keep the page layout” to preserve spacing. It is still plain text, not a Word file, so complex tables may need a cleanup pass.

Files are processed for the run, then removed after a short time. Download the text if you need to keep it.

Extract text from a PDF online

Need the words out of a PDF without opening Acrobat? This page extracts text from a PDF into a .txt file you can search, paste, or edit.

How to get text from a PDF

Upload a PDF up to 80 MB.
Leave Keep the page layout on if you care about columns and spacing.
Press Convert file and download the text file.

What you get

A UTF-8 text file. Headings and paragraphs are there as text. Images, fonts, and interactive forms are not. This is a copy of the words, not a second PDF.

When the result looks empty

The PDF may be a scan. This tool does not do OCR. If you can highlight and copy text in a reader, this page can extract it. If you cannot, you need an OCR tool instead.