Common PDF to Text Extraction Errors and Fixes

If your PDF to text output looks wrong, the source PDF structure is usually the reason.

Typical issues

• Empty output files
• Words split incorrectly across lines
• Tables flattening into plain text
• Missing characters from scanned PDFs

Fast fixes

• Try a smaller page range first to isolate problematic pages.
• Verify the PDF contains selectable text.
• Re-export source documents from the original app when possible.

For scanned PDFs

Image-only scans often need OCR before text extraction. If there is no selectable text, extraction tools return little or no content.

Before sharing results

• Spot-check totals, names, and dates.
• Compare extracted output with one source page.
• Keep the original PDF as a reference copy.

Related tools

• PDF to Clean Text
• PDF to JPG

Use this tool

• PDF to Clean Text
• All tools