How to Convert a PDF to Text on Mac — Extract Text Content
Extract text content from a PDF on Mac using a free browser tool or built-in methods. Copy all text from any PDF without retyping.
Extract all text from a PDF on Mac without retyping. Use FixMyPDF's PDF to Text tool in Safari, or use Preview's built-in text export — no Adobe Acrobat needed.
When to Convert PDF to Text on Mac
Extracting contract text to paste into a Word document for editing. Copying all content from a research paper for text analysis. Getting machine-readable text from a scanned document (if it has OCR). Feeding PDF content into a language model or text processing script.
Method 1: FixMyPDF Browser Tool
Open fixmypdf.in/tools/pdf-text in Safari or Chrome on Mac. Upload your PDF. Click "Extract Text". Download the .txt file containing all extracted text. Fast and handles multi-page PDFs in one step.
Method 2: Select All and Copy in Preview
Open the PDF in Preview. Press Cmd+A to select all content on the current page. Press Cmd+C to copy. Paste into TextEdit or any text editor. For multi-page PDFs, repeat per page — Preview's select-all only works on the visible page.
Method 3: pdftotext (Poppler, CLI)
Install with brew install poppler (Homebrew). Then: pdftotext input.pdf output.txt. Extracts all text from all pages in one command. Best for multi-page PDFs or automated scripts on Mac.
What About Scanned PDFs?
Scanned PDFs are images — they have no embedded text to extract. To get text from a scanned PDF, you need OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Preview on Mac can perform OCR automatically (macOS Monterey+): open the PDF, text is recognised live. For older macOS, use FixMyPDF which may have OCR capability, or Adobe Acrobat.
Text Encoding and Special Characters
Extracted text files use UTF-8 encoding by default, handling accented characters, non-Latin scripts, and special symbols correctly. When pasting into Word or Google Docs, choose "Paste and Match Style" to avoid formatting issues.
Privacy
FixMyPDF processes locally in Safari or Chrome. Your PDF text content never leaves your Mac. CLI tools (pdftotext, Preview) are entirely on-device by definition.
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