PrivascanExtract the text from a PDF
Pulls the text layer out as a plain .txt file, marked page by page. Useful for quoting, searching or feeding a document to something else.
Before you upload anything — you will not have to
- Nothing came out of my scan.
- Then the scan has no text layer — it is a picture of a page. Reading it needs OCR, which the Privascan iPhone app does on the device, for free.
- Why is the layout different from the page?
- A PDF stores where each fragment of text is drawn, not sentences and paragraphs. The extraction follows the order the fragments are drawn in, which usually matches reading order and sometimes does not — columns and tables are where it shows.
- Are accents preserved?
- Yes, where the document says which encoding it used. A document whose fonts hide that behind glyph indices can produce gaps, which is a property of the file rather than of this tool.