PDF to Text

A React app that extracts text from PDF files entirely in the browser. No server, no upload — pdf.js does the parsing on your machine.

What it does

• Drag-and-drop or click to select a PDF
• Reconstructs text line by line using the PDF's actual character positions, so paragraphs and tables stay readable instead of running together
• Shows word and character counts
• Copy to clipboard or download as a .txt file
• Handles multi-page PDFs, with a --- Page Break --- marker between pages

Setup

You need Node.js 18 or later.

npm install
npm run dev

Open the URL Vite prints (usually http://localhost:5173).

Build for production

npm run build
npm run preview

The build output lands in dist/. Deploy it anywhere that serves static files (Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages, S3).

How the extraction works

PDF.js gives you each text fragment with its x/y coordinates on the page. Raw concatenation of those fragments scrambles multi-column layouts and tables. reconstructPageText in src/App.jsx groups fragments into lines by y-coordinate, sorts each line left to right by x-coordinate, and inserts spaces where there's an actual gap between fragments. That keeps columns and spacing closer to what you'd see in the original PDF.

Scanned PDFs (images of text, no embedded text layer) won't extract anything — this is text extraction, not OCR. If you need that, swap in tesseract.js for the empty-result case.

Project structure

pdf-to-text/
├── index.html
├── package.json
├── vite.config.js
└── src/
    ├── main.jsx
    ├── App.jsx     # extraction logic + UI
    └── App.css