Need to extract text from a PDF on your Mac? Whether it's for editing, searching, or copying content, macOS makes it easier than you might think. Here are the best free methods.

Using Preview (Built-in)

Your Mac's Preview app isn't just for viewing PDFs—it can extract text too.

  1. Open the PDF in Preview
  2. Click the Edit menu
  3. Select Select All (Cmd+A)
  4. Copy the selected text (Cmd+C)
  5. Paste into TextEdit or any text editor

Note: This works best with text-based PDFs, not scanned documents.

Using Automator

macOS Automator can create a workflow to extract text from multiple PDFs:

  1. Open Automator from Applications
  2. Create a new Workflow
  3. Add the Extract PDF Text action
  4. Drag your PDF files into the workflow
  5. Run the workflow to get text files

Using TextEdit

The simplest approach for single files:

  1. Open TextEdit
  2. Go to File > Open
  3. Select your PDF and click Open
  4. TextEdit will attempt to extract and display the text

For Scanned PDFs (OCR)

If you have scanned documents, you'll need OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Use:

Pro Tips