Practical use cases

  • Copying the text of a report into a notes app or an email.
  • Getting the raw text of a document to search or analyze.
  • Reusing a paragraph without retyping it.

What it does — and doesn’t — do

It reads only selectable text; scanned pages (pictures of text) have none, and PDFDistrict does not do OCR. Layout, tables and columns are not reproduced: you get lines of text, in the order the PDF stores them.

Common problems

  • You get a message that no text was found: the PDF is probably scanned, so its pages are images. Text extraction needs selectable text.
  • Words or columns appear in a strange order: the PDF stores text in its own order, which does not always match how the page looks, especially with columns and tables.
  • Accents look wrong in a text editor: the file is UTF-8; open it with an editor that supports UTF-8.